


Kamen Rider Utsura: Sidequests

by starofjustice



Series: Kamen Rider Utsura [5]
Category: Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:28:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26793655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starofjustice/pseuds/starofjustice
Summary: Collection of side content and vignettes from the deranged world of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid and its fan sequel, Kamen Rider Utsura. Sometime serious, sometimes silly. Come on in and see!
Relationships: Hanaya Taiga/Saiba Nico
Series: Kamen Rider Utsura [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1284614
Kudos: 3





	1. You Must Play...Sega Saturn

Without warning the street seemed to have gone silent. Kamen Rider Rune looked back and forth, over the ground but also up the walls for any sign of their enemy.

“Do you see him?” Kamen Rider Sling demanded, the wind conveniently picking up to dramatically blow his suit’s poncho around.

“Wouldn’t I have told you if I did?” Rune replied, with growing annoyance.

“Don’t worry, kids!” cackled a voice above them. “If you’re having that much trouble, I’ll just come to you!”

The two looked straight up just as a dark shape with what looked like countless spindly arms came down on top of them like a meteor.

“The unstoppable Kumanic strikes again!” the purple spider-man laughed as he jumped off the two Kamen Riders he’d just knocked flat. His clusters of red compound eyes seemed to shine and the four extra legs sticking out sides shook with an amusement all their own.

His cackling stopped suddenly as an energy bullet glanced off one of his antennae. “HEY!” Kumanic yelled. “Cut that out!”

Sling didn’t. His Pamaka fired in a downward burst that hit the spider monster on his forehead, across his crystalline eyes and down onto his chest. Rune pointed his staff and a storm of icy spikes shot across the street next that battered against Kumanic’s shell-like skin. He rocked forward and back on his feet from the machine-gun impacts until he finally went flying a few feet and hit a dumpster.

Both Riders closed in to press their attack but Kumanic suddenly jumped back up, ready to fight. He spewed a sticky white web from his mouth that covered Rune, pinning his arms and forcing the tip of his staff against his chin. No way he could attack like that without blowing his own head off.

Sling fired his gun but Kumanic jumped out of the way and stuck to the wall of a building, vaulted off it on his thickest legs, spewing another web over the cowboy Rider too. Both were stuck to the ground, standing upright but unable to aim their weapons to fight back.

“Kumanic the unstoppable!” the monster cheered himself. “No matter what the Riders throw at him, he always comes out on top!” Eight flaps on his sides opened and a fist-sized spider jumped out from each, all over the trapped Kamen Riders.

Their tiny mandibles and razor-sharp raked against the Riders’ armor. Sparks shot out and both yelled in pain.

Rune was the fragile one among their group; he was knocked down, the web torn to bits around him but his Gashat ejected from his staff. His armor faded from the punishment he’d just taken.

Sling clenched his teeth inside of his mask and managed to get his gun up and aim a shot at Kumanic. The giant spider pounced on Sling, slashing the Rider with the pointed tips of his own numerous legs. More sparks flew and Sling hit the ground next to Doku, reverted to Yoshoku.

“Kumanic the merciless!” the monster cheered for himself again, pumping his fists up toward the sky. “The toughest Kamen Riders crumble in front of me!”

Yoshoku wasn’t listening to Kumanic’s self-promotion, though. He reached out, his arm shaking, for where his Chase Billion cartridge had landed when he was pummeled back to normal.

But then he noticed someone else on their battlefield. Standing just behind his Gashat was a man wearing a faded martial arts gi, with a belt as black as his hair, not to mention as black as the look on his craggy face.

And immediately Yoshoku knew his name.

“….Segata Sanshiro!”

“Oh my god it is,” Doku said, breathless at the sight.

Right away Kumanic’s little victory celebration stopped. “Impossible,” he said, though as if really trying convince himself. “He’s not real.”

The pain from being flipped over Segata Sanshiro’s shoulder hard enough to leave an imprint with all his legs said otherwise.

Kumanic immediately flexed his legs on one side and flipped himself on to his stomach. The spider crawled back along the ground to where his attacker was waiting, then jumped at Segata Sanshiro, his limbs spread wide to catch the martial artist, a poison barb extended from his mouth aimed at the fleshy human throat.

But Segata Sanshiro’s powerful hand shot out and grabbed the giant spider by his own throat, easily holding him back. His other hand grabbed onto one of Kumanic’s legs and tossed him down the street. Literally, throwing the arachnid game villain into the street so hard he skidded down it displacing the asphalt and breaking off Kumanic’s poisonous barb.

And before Kumanic could even start recovering Segata Sanshiro had jumped onto his back and trapped the monster in a fierce headlock. Kumanic’s limbs tore up the ground with the tips of all his arms as he tried to struggle free from Segata Sanshiro’s grip, but the fighter was strong. Stronger than any human had a right to be.

Suddenly the flaps on his torso flicked open and more tiny spiders like the ones that had defeated the Kamen Riders crawled out of Kumanic’s body. In another second they were all over Segata Sanshiro. The tiny spider robots stabbed into him with their knife-tipped legs, and after another second Segata Sanshiro had to let go.

Kumanic rolled over with all his strength, swinging only his sharp arachnid legs at his opponent. All of a sudden Segata Sanshiro seemed to land from a jump a safe distance away, but it was if he’d just _stopped being_ next to Kumanic before landing from his jump.

Then he did something completely unexpected.

Segata Sanshiro thrust his right arm straight out across his chest and twisted his torso his right. Suddenly he pulled his arm back to his side and thrust out his left arm across his chest.

His black belt had transformed into a white belt with a silver pod on the front, red/green/blue lights spinning inside it. Waves of colorful power surged out, burning off Kumanic’s killer spiders.

Then, Segata Sanshiro had transformed. He had on a black undersuit on with silver stripes on the arms and legs, the same color of the gloves and boots he had on with his new uniform. Panels of green armor covered his chest underneath a long red muffler around his neck, and a round blue helmet with bug-like antennae and a pair of piercing red eyes over his head.

No, not a helmet. A mask.

And then then he launched himself at Kumanic, one silver-colored fist aimed at the spider-man’s jaw. “ **Rider…PUNCH!!** ” The awesome attack connected and Kumanic went somersaulting backward until he crashed into the corner of a building.

He looked up and spat one of his webs at his opponent, who crouched then jumped high over it, thrusting his arms up next to his head. The web shot past underneath and splattered all over a car parked across the street.

But as the web coiled around the car, crushing it under incredible pressure, the masked warrior stuck out his right foot. “ **Rider…KICK!!** ”

His boot hit Kumanic with a *CRACK*. The spider was lifted off the ground by the kick’s awesome force, a cloud of HIT graphics popping out all over Kumanic’s body. He was just opening his mouth to scream when he was consumed by a huge fireball. A stream of purple particles flowed away from the explosion up into the sky.

“Incredible,” Yoshoku breathed as he watched the end of the battle.

“Unbelievable power,” Doku echoed. “He’s even stronger than I heard…”

Then they realized Segata Sanshiro was looking back at the two of them, hands on his hips. The two teens shrank back.

He thrust a retro game console he’d produced from somewhere at them.

“You must play Sega Saturn!” he commanded.

“We will, sir!” Yoshoku said, grabbing the offered system. “Won’t we, Dasao?”

“Yeah, right now!”

He looked down at them, the teens wondering silently just what he looked behind his mask, before he suddenly jumped, flipped over their heads and landed in the seat of a motorcycle behind them that simply hadn’t been there before. He gunned the engine once and roared away.

“What a man,” Doku said in awe. Yoshoku could only nod while the bike vanished into the distance.


	2. Errand of Mercy

On the roof the “fasten seat belt” light came back on.

The flight attendant picked up her microphone and announced something in English, hopefully that they were finally about to land.

And the sooner he got to deliver the case cupped protectively in his tense hands, the better.

After a few more minutes he felt the landing gear bounce off the runway then hit it again and start to roll. The plane slowed and drove to a boarding gate, and as soon as the attendants opened the hatch he was out of his seat and squeezing through all the people getting their luggage out of the overhead bins. He’d had a lot of practice dodging worse than them.

…but nobody had _ever_ been worse than _her._

While he walked away from the gate, flipping through his phone trying to find the address of his destination, he thought about renting a car or if he should just hail a ride. That way he could leave the engine running when he ran in, dropped off the package, and got away before she had a chance to come up with the energy to launch into her routine.

And then he saw her at the end of the waiting area.

Wearing a ball cap showing a colorful starscape, a white flu mask over her face, red sports jacket and grey plaid skirt above her bright blue high sneakers, neon pink backpack hanging off her shoulders.

Arms folded over her chest, tapping her foot against the floor.

How had she gotten past security if she wasn’t boarding a flight?

Then again, how could anyone keep her out?

“Oy! Taiga! I was waiting forever for you to show up!” she snapped.

His usual scowl turned even sharper. “I didn’t just come down the block!”

“I called you _yesterday_ about my cold!” Nico snapped at him.

“And here I am _today_!” he snapped back, shoving the sealed bowl in his hands into hers.

Nico opened it and stared down at the brown broth for a minute in silence. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Chicken soup.”

“It’s _cold!_ ”

“Tch! You need someone to put it in the microwave for you too?” Taiga asked.

Nico stamped her foot. “What kind of doctor are you, anyway?”

“One who’s flying back home right now,” Taiga said, and turned around and walked down the boarding ramp into the plane he’d just left, and took a seat near the back.

“Sir?” an extremely confused flight attendant said. “The plane just landed.”

“I know. I’m waiting for it to fly away again.”

The flight attendant looked up the aisle, totally caught by surprise. She took a deep breath and collected herself before she turned back to face the passenger, who was either crazy or the least amusing crank she’d ever met in this business. “Sir, are you sure this is your connecting flight?” she managed to ask.

“Tch! Anywhere’s better than here,” Taiga grunted, folding his arms over his chest and looking out the window.

As if the attendant’s day couldn’t get any worse, an angry girl in a flu mask came stomping down the aisle toward the strange man in the scarf. “ _Taiga_! This isn’t what we talked about! You said you’d let me show you around!”

“You didn’t say you’d be so ungrateful for the medicine I brought, either.”

Nico scoffed, then grabbed his scarf and dragged him out of the plane by the neck. He gasped and struggled with it as she pulled him way.

The flight attendant sat down in the seat behind Taiga’s and sighed with no small relief.


	3. The Things We Treasure

The storm picked up around them, and he could feel the unique tinge of his enemy’s arcane power behind it. Bolts of lightning lashed from the dark clouds spinning into a forbidding vortex that stared down on the battlefield like the eye of some angry divinity.

And then, the next blow was thrown.

From the dark stronghold a ray of crimson light lanced into the dark clouds overhead. The vortex _roared_ , then expelled a flaming meteor that slammed into the middle of his battlefield, obliterating two of the hatchlings he’d been planning to grow into true behemoths after his power had a chance to return. Sadly he shook his head at the senseless waste, but braced himself as another meteor came down closer to the end of the field. The hellish projectile came down with an epic crash, shattering the walls he’d created to defend his forces in a fireball that was blinding even from that far away.

There was no time to waste. He turned to the golden chalice on his war table and threw in the flask of a bright golden potion he’d been saving for a more strategic moment. If he didn’t strike now, there might be no strategic moment at all. Already he could see the dark, winged shapes of his enemy’s dragon army taking off from their nests in the distance.

“By the blood of the primal, consecrated in the Vessel of the Progenitors, be strengthened, Pink Eaglewing!” he yelled and pointed to a young dragon waiting on the fields outside his castle. A ray of energy shot from his hand and covered the pink-scaled beast. She threw her head back and spread her wings wide, a few pink and white feathers scattering to the rising winds as she made her trumpeting call.

Her master’s power filled her and her call turned louder, more savage. Her wings grew wider, her body longer until she was brushing against the hatchling dragons next to her. They looked up at her in awe, no longer a mere Pink Eaglewing. Her scales had turned the color of blood, a crown of spiraling white horns emerging from the back of her head. Drops of a poisonous fluid fell from between her feathers and sizzled on the ground.

Now, she had reached her full growth, the legendary Crimson Bloodwing dragon.

The same invigorating energy shot from his hand out to other dragons on the field waiting for their orders, or for the touch of power their master was now using to bless them.

With each ray the smoke from his chalice was thinning, but with each ray the size of his army was exploding with new legendary strength. Led by the giant Crimson Bloodwing a column of dragons took off from the field.

Already the enemy army was most of the way to his castle, groups of Black Arcteryx leading the charge. Fast and fierce, but not the strongest of dragons.

As the Crimson Bloodwing proved with her first blast of poison breath, knocking the sleek black horrors out of the sky.

XXX

“That’s 3500 damage, and your Black Arcteryx are defeated,” Doku Dasao announced proudly.

The seven-year-old boy sitting across the table from him blinked at him, looked down at the carefully latticed spread of monster and magic effect cards between them, then back up at Doku again.

“I’d say that decides the tourney,” Doku said proudly to the heavy guy sitting behind the gaming store’s counter. Realizing he was being addressed, he glanced up from whatever he was staring at on his phone, and reached under the counter with one hand.

The cashier slapped a chintzy plastic trophy on the counter. It was of a dragon, wings splayed, sitting on a block that had “TAICERANEGO” written across the top, and on the bottom “Dragon’s Nest Champion.” The whole thing was covered in reflective gold paint and stood maybe five inches high.

“Whooo!” Doku exclaimed, as he grabbed his prize and swept out the door with it, grinning like he’d beaten an army with one finger.


	4. Pizza of Ultimate Darkness, Part 1

In front of him the table thudded under the immense weight of what had just been dropped on it.

“Go on, dig in.”

“This isn’t really what I’m good at…”

“What do you mean? You love eating! You love eating even more than Bibi does!”

“She _does_ love eating,” he conceded.

Slowly, uncertainly, Burgermon tried to pull off a slice of deep dish pizza Kibi was having him try. Five inches seemed excessively deep for deep dish, though. Burgermon was rapidly learning that his host was an experimenter; no matter how crazy a recipe sounded, Kibi was willing to try anything once to find the miracle dish to found his pizza empire on.

Burgermon pulled on a slice.

It wouldn’t budge.

He pulled harder, but the slice was stuck to the rest of the pie like cement. Burgermon didn’t have to say anything, Kibi was watching his friend failing to separate it from the rest of his most recent creation. Kibi’s round face shined from the heat of the kitchen, the only place Kibi claimed to feel really at home. His belt was tighter, like he might’ve actually sweated off a few pounds Burgermon had met him. His hair was just stubble on his scalp after one of his self-inflicted razor haircuts to keep it simple and get it over with fast.

Kibi’s face seemed to be scrunching in on itself when he frowned down at his friend’s failure to separate a portion of his new pizza to sample, though. Regardless of how seriously he _didn’t_ take his appearance, there was nothing Kibi could focus on as intensely as the philosophy of pizza recipes.

“Not to worry!” he said, thrusting his finger straight up as his usual blind optimism took over. “I have a cutter than can cut through _anything_!”

Already Kibi had the Ju Ju Pizza game in his hand and jammed his thumb down on its trigger. He turned it over, inserting it circuit-first into the slot on the pizza-orange Gamer Driver Kibi had on out of nowhere. “ **Henshin!** ” Kibi exclaimed, face turning into a grin.

The usual blast of garish colors followed. Chopped mushrooms, fish, peppers and onions spun through the air and shrank to into dark outlines traveling up the arms and legs of Kibi’s orange armor as he transformed into the mighty Kamen Rider ZZa. His giant pizza cutter, the Gashacon Wheel, was already attached to his arm, the pink disc on the end spinning as if eager for its task.

ZZa jumped up on the stool across from Burgermon, who leaned back in his own from surprise. In a very unsanitary fashion ZZa propped one foot on the edge of the table, and brought down the whirring wheel of his great pizza-slicing weapon like he was delivering justice to an implacable enemy.

Fountains of sparks erupted from the pizza as the giant wheel came down. ZZa leaned back and forth, bravely trying to carve through the massive pizza.

His blade didn’t even sink half an inch into it.

Burgermon wasn’t noticing that detail, though. Sparks had landed on top of the giant hamburger that made up his head and set the top bun on fire. He yelped and rank to the kitchen, sticking his head under the faucet.

ZZa pressed the blade of his weapon harder against the seemingly indestructible super-deep dish pizza. Burgermon’s loyalty to his vision of an empire of pizza restaurants was a prize he valued above most things; ZZa wouldn’t let the monster see him defeated by one of his own recipes. He leaned over harder but his blade didn’t go deeper even with the pressure of his superhuman strength behind it.

“Grrraaagh!” ZZa yelled and yanked back his arm. Burgermon peeked out of the door to the kitchen, his giant burger-topped head not surreptitious at all. The Rider didn’t notice him, instead focused entirely on the pizza that defied them. _Mocked_ them.

“You will not win,” Kamen Rider ZZa warned his pizza. It said nothing, but sometimes it was what an opponent _didn’t_ say that mattered.

ZZa clenched his fingers around the grip on his weapon, holding his finger down on the throttle button. He raked the wheeled across the pizza, then across it again an angle the bisected the first one. A third time at an angle that bisected the second, and then crossed the third angle in the middle with a fourth.

The classic pizza slice. It never failed.

And so it was when ZZa tried to pull away a slice, he was extremely surprised when it still refused to separate from the rest of the pie.

“No pizza can beat me!” ZZa declared. “I’m the master of pizza!”

“What are you yelling about, honey?” asked a short, heavy girl with a round face like Kibi’s. Her limp black hair was pulled back in a tiny ponytail.

Burgermon cringed. “Eh, Bibiko-san…this might not be the best time. He’s all fired up about this new pizza,” the game monster tried to warn her.

“Don’t worry, Bibi-chan!” ZZa said with unfailing confidence. “No pizza can defeat me! I _am_ pizza!”

The girl, Bibiko, walked right past the proud Rider. “I guess the new cheese mix is a little tougher than I thought.”

“You mixed the cheese?” ZZa asked, not quite believing her. “With what? Cement??”

She was completely unimpressed, whapping him upside the head with a wet rag. “It’s been too bland lately, honey,” she informed him. “You can’t have people loving your pizza if it tastes boring.”

ZZa let go of the throttle on his pizza wheel. It spun to a stop. ZZa stepped closer to the girl who didn’t move, and hugged her in his powerful arms, lifting her right up off the floor. Bibiko didn’t move, letting him make his display of affection.

“Bibi-chan, I love you,” ZZa whispered. “You’re just as dedicated to my dream as we are! You’re never afraid to tell me what I need to hear!”

“Her cooking could stand some work,” Burgermon mumbled. Bibiko didn’t hear, or ignored her boyfriend’s weird partner. She walked over to the indestructible pizza and knocked on it with her knuckles. A hollow stone echo was the response.

“Maybe I should leave a few out and try again,” Bibiko mused.

ZZa gasped. “Make it soft enough to eat, but still chewy! We’ll call the restaurant ‘Pizza Bricks: We’re Tough as a S***house!” he exclaimed. “How about that?”

“Might want to workshop that name a little bit, honey,” Bibiko suggested.

None of them noticed the dark figure slipping away from the window.

**To Be Continued…**


	5. Pizza of Ultimate Darkness, Part 2

Kibi sat at his kitchen table, chin cradled in his hands.

Burgermon sat next to him, his bottom bun cradled in his hands.

Bibiko sat facing Kibi, crunching loudly on a bag of potato chips.

All of them were looking down at the invincible pizza they’d cooked. Sitting there. Staring back. _Defying_ them.

“I don’t know about just throwing this away,” Kibi murmured. “That seems…dangerous.”

“That’s easy,” Bibiko replied. “Use it to fix that hole in the bedroom ceiling. I’m getting tired of listening to ran falling in those pans and buckets we put under it.”

Kibi gasped and hugged his girlfriend, his arms sinking into her soft middle. “That’s why I need you, Bibi,” he sighed happily. “You’re always so practical.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and pried herself out of Kibi’s embrace. “I’ll go look at the recipe again and see what to change. Go fix the ceiling and I’ll see you later, okay, Kibi-chan?” she asked.

“You bet, my undying love!” Kibi gushed. “Burger-chan, get the ladder and meet me out back after I get the super glue, or something.”

“The ladder’s heavy,” Burgermon said. “Thank for trusting me with the important job!”

Kibi winked back at him and smiled. “You’re welcome, buddy!”

Their little group flowed out of the room through different doors. A minute later Bibiko leaned her head back in. “Hey, Kibi-chan? Did you take the new recipe we used for this pizza? I can’t find it!”

No answer.

Bibiko walked slowly, actually cautiously into the room. A chill crept up her spine. Something was wrong.

Then she noticed the table.

The unbreakable pizza pie was gone.

“Kibi-chan! Did you take the pizza with you already?” she called out.

XXX

Kibi stepped back into the kitchen, a tube of super glue in his hand. His skin was glistening with sweat from the late summer heat. “Did you say something, my undying love?” he asked.

“I asked if you took the pizza with you,” Bibiko replied. “It was gone when I came back to ask you where you put the new recipe you used to make it.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t take it just to go to the back to get glue. It’s heavy, why would I do that?” Then his face lit up with a sly smile. “Wait, I bet Burgermon took it! He was so proud of me calling him strong just now!”

“What did you do with the recipe, though?” Bibiko asked. “I want to know what all we did so can avoid making it so hard next time.”

“I didn’t take it,” Kibi answered, his face contorting itself inward with confusion. “Why would I want the pizza recipe to fix a hole in the roof?”

There was a thump like something heavy being placed against the outside wall, and Burgermon stuck his giant hamburger head through the back door. “I have the ladder ready, Kibi-san…what’s wrong?”

“Burgermon, did you take the pizza?” Kibi asked.

“And the recipe for it?” Bibiko followed.

The game monster reached up and scratched the bun on top of his art, knocking off an oversize sesame seed. “What are you talking about? I didn’t touch either of those,” he replied. “You just said to get the ladder!”

Kibi’s jaw dropped. “Wait a minute…what’s going on?”

His question was answered as he spotted something bizarre out the window.

Someone was running down the street holding the unbreakable pizza over their head.

XXX

“Oi! OI!!! Stop right there, you dirty thief!” Kibi shouted as he ran down the street, Burgermon struggling to keep up his boss, Kibi’s strength fueled by his outrage at one of his creations being stolen out from under his nose.

Even a totally inedible pizza.

He leaned over, trying to get some impression of the thief’s face in case they got much farther ahead of him. The grey hoodie they were wearing concealed everything, however. Instead he clenched his teeth and picked up the pace. Kibi wasn’t the fittest Kamen Rider in the country, or the smartest, but there were few who could match him for pure, unbridled energy.

People stared as the bizarre procession ran by them, the indistinct thief carrying a pizza overhead, the overweight chef chasing them down, and the burger monster doing his absolute best to keep up with them all.

“Is this some kind of publicity stunt?” one teenage girl asked her friend, having just gotten over the surprise of the thief charging in front of them.

“It sure is!” Kibi answered. “Keep an eye out for Pizza Bricks! We’re tough as a—”

“NO! We aren’t!” Burgermon cut him off.

The distance between Kibi and the thief got smaller and smaller while Kibi’s lungs were starting to burn. Suddenly they dashed around a corner but Kibi zoomed right after them. His belly was chafing against the bulky belt he had on, which he hoped he wouldn’t need to use.

But what kind of person would steal a rock-hard pizza?

Maybe the better question was, what kind of monster would want one?

Much to the relief of Kibi’s lungs, the thief stopped in an empty lot. “Ah, so you…,” Kibi gasped and rested his hands on his knees. “…give up, do you? Hand…hand that over, and maybe…maybe we’ll go easy on you.”

“You’ll never get this back, Kamen Rider!” the thief said in a feminine voice with a weird trilling quality. Pulling back their hood, they exposed the head of a grey-furred rabbit. Kibi shut his eyes and gave his head a good shake to assure himself he wasn’t seeing things.

“Kibi-san…who is THAT?” Burgermon asked in loud surprise.

“I’m the Rabbit Queen! I come from the game of Rabbit Hutch, where children raise adorable bunnies like real pets!” the thief answered before Kibi could even give a wild guess. “But I’m going to do so much more than make children happy from now on! I’m going to rid the world of worthless junk food like pizza!”  
Kibi’s eyes turned red with rage. Burgermon took a fearful step backward. “WHAT?!” Kibi screamed.

The Rabbit Queen went on, undaunted. “Without unhealthy alternatives, chhildren will learn to love lettuce and celery instead! With this demonic recipe of yours I can make all pizza inedible!”

His hands were clenched. Just like his teeth. Burgermon was sure he saw small sparks shooting off them.

Just like before the Rabbit Queen seemed not to even notice, as she declared, “First your beloved pizzerias, then every other kind will be next! I will destroy the junk food industry with this ultimate Dark Pizza!”

**to be continued…**


	6. Pizza of Ultimate Darkness, Part 3

In the blink of an eye the Ju Ju Pizza game was in Kibi’s hand. “I’ll never let you get away with something so _evil_!” he declared righteously.

Across the lot the Rabbit Queen’s ears quivered and she let out a haughty laugh, actually raising one hand and covering her mouth with the back. “You think you can stop me? I’m untouchable, thanks to _you_!”

“ **Henshin!** ”

Strands of pizza toppings were still forming themselves into decorations on Kamen Rider ZZa’s armor as he charged up to Rabbit Queen. His powerful Gashacon Wheel was already on his arm and he slashed at Rabbit Queen with the whirring blade.

Her sneakers suddenly exploded into furry white feet twice their apparent length and she easily bounced backward out of his reach. ZZa charged his furry tormentor and went into another slash but she jumped over him, somersaulted and smacked him on the back of his head with Pizza of Darkness.

A sound like hollow metal reverberated across the lot. ZZa tumbled forward and hit the ground with a crash, the Gashacon Wheel slowing to a stop.

“Not exactly Ex-Aid, were you, kid?” Rabbit Queen chortled. She took a short bounce closer, raising the Pizza of Darkness to club him again.

Someone moved faster. Rabbit Queen stopped short when she saw a figure in dark armor blocking the way, staring back defiantly at her from the face partially exposed in the giant hamburger on his shoulders.

“You can’t hurt Kibi-san! I won’t let you ruin his dream!” Burgermon said.

Rabbit Queen smirked, her buck teeth sticking out a bit more in scorn. “His dream is to make people eat disgusting, greasy food when they could be eating something healthy and green?”

Burgermon pointed an accusing finger at the rabbit kaijin. “You don’t know anything! Kibi gives everything to his dream! He leaves in a beat-up old house so he can spend all his money perfecting his recipes! He was sick with Game Syndrome for years, just so he could bring me to life and ask me to help him! Kibi-san wants to make people happy with delicious food! I won’t let anyone take that away from him!”

“If you were any other Bugster, I might actually be a little worried,” Rabbit Queen said with a sad shake of her head.

She threw the Dark Pizza at Burgermon’s exposed face.

It twirled over and over at him, everything seeming to slow down as if the inedible pizza was somehow draining everything around it to hit Burgermon harder. It was becoming an irresistible force.

And Burgermon was definitely no immovable object.

When the Dark Pizza was only a few feet away from him Burgermon suddenly pulled the buns of the burger on his head open wide. Ketchup sprayed out, mustard, onions and tomato slices. Coating everything in an arc in front of Burgermon. Including the incoming confection of evil.

It fell. Hitting the ground and rolling on its edges for a few moments like a manhole cover. All of the power behind it just gone.

“…What…what did you do?” demanded Rabbit Queen in complete shock.

“It’s simple,” Burgermon explained. “That pizza’s horrible, inedible food. Hamburgers are delicious and satisfying. Their power defeated it.”

Rabbit Queen clenched her fists and bent over, her eyes pointed at the ground and starting to turn yellow, then red, with rage. “No, it isn’t possible…all my dreams of healthy green vegetables!”

Burgermon squeezed the buns on his head tight again. “That dream isn’t possible,” he said, turning slightly to make ZZa was still all right. To his relief, the Rider was managing to sit up. “Food are gifts. Gifts can only be offered, not forced. Otherwise…otherwise it isn’t done to help people improve. It’s only forcing someone’s own desires…”

“You’re awfully philosophical for an idiot with a burger for a head,” Rabbit Queen sneered at him.

“This isn’t my head—”

She wielded a sword with a long carrot as the blade, its leaves the hilt. “Don’t worry, you’ll never think again after I’m done with you!”

Wild swings from the vegetable blade came at Burgermon too fast for the hefty monster to avoid. A blow to his chest. His leg. One right under his chin knocked him on his back. Rabbit queen pinned his waist with one giant foot and aimed the tip of her vegetable sword right at his chest. The next stab would be fatal.

If it got a chance to come. “Not so fast, rabbit bitch!” Kamen Rider ZZa charged in and chopped through the blade of Rabbit Queen’s carrot sword. The tip spun end over end and end before the tip stabbed dramatically into the ground. “My dream can’t happen without my partner! What am I supposed to do without that brain of his?!”

Rabbit Queen made a powerful bound backwards. Suddenly there was a sprig of vegetable in her furry hand. She chewed it up and blew a cloud from her mouth at ZZa and Burgermon. “Parsley Attack!”

“Oh no…it smells so sweet!” ZZa whined.

“Stay strong, Kibi-san!” Burgermon moaned, reaching out to touch his friend’s hand as ZZa crumpled to his knees, both of them overpowered by the pungent smell in the air. Rabbit Queen twirled a carrot-tipped spear and threw it between the two and knocked them both down again.

Suddenly Rabbit Queen bounced closer and landed with a foot coming down on top of each of them. She jumped high, did a somersault then came down again smashing her feet onto her opponents.

Kamen Rider ZZa reached out and clutched Burgermon’s gloved hand. “Partner, if we get out of this alive, will you help me make dream of serving everyone delicious food come true?” ZZa gasped weakly.

“Of course, Kibi-san,” Burgermon confirmed.

“Heh! That’s all I need to hear!” ZZa rolled over onto his stomach and blocked Rabbit Queen’s next stomp on the side of his Gashacon Wheel. He shoved the surprised villain away with her giving a surprised squawk.

Scrambling his feet until he got a solid footing, ZZa got up and held down the power button to start the wheel spinning again. He raised the wheel and parried a stab from Rabbit Queen’s spear on the side. Sparks tinged with orange surrounded him but Rabbit Queen jumped back.

She scowled so hard at the Rider and his friend it was a wonder they didn’t burst into flames. “VEGETABLES WILL SAVE THE WORLD!” Rabbit Queen screamed, and grabbed the Pizza of Darkness, the indestructible pie humming with power already in her furry fingers. “ **APOCALYPSE BUFFET ATTACK!** ” Crouching, she launched herself into the air, so high she was over the roofs of the buildings around them, and then shrank into a black dot in the sky. A glowing sphere of crimson left no doubt she was about to make a big impact when she landed.

ZZa turned to Burgermon. “There’s only one way we’re gonna survive this, partner,” the Kamen Rider said.

“I know,” Burgermon nodded. “We have to fire back with everything we’ve got, and hope it’s enough.”

“It’ll be enough,” Kamen Rider ZZa assured his friend.

As they said it the ball of red fire in the distance started coming back down, getting bigger every second. “Time for that move we were practicing,” ZZa said. “ **ULTIMATE JUNK FOOD WAVE!** ”

Next to him Burgermon whimpered with excitement.

Shapes pelted down out of Rabbit Queen’s giant ball of energy. Dagger-sharp carrots and celery fell down around the two, embedding in the ground. Ripe tomatoes and lettuce splattered on the ground. One caught ZZa in the chest but Burgermon caught his best friend before the Rider could fall.

ZZa started the attack. He sprayed bullets of tomato sauce from a nozzle on the back of his weapon, moving it in a sweeping pattern and blasting the incoming healthy vegetables away. Another canister went into the back of the Gashacon Wheel and ZZa sweeped back the other way while firing a salvo of garlic butter to intercept more leafy green veggies.

Burgermon peeled back the top bun over his head, reached and pulled out both hands full of giant chopped onions and tomato slices shiny with secret sauce. He spun in place like a tornado, flinging the toppings like giant throwing stars and deflecting even more of Rabbit Queen’s vegetable bombardment. One onion hit the furry villain herself right on the forehead and left the fur sticky with unidentifiable sauce.

“Hey!” she screeched, but neither of her targets could hear her. The giant energy ball was so close it was covering the entire sky by that point. Rabbit Queen could be seen in the very middle, sneering at their imminent demise. Around her were endless rows of vegetables, the most lethal salad the world had ever seen. At the center of it all was the most evil pizza the world had ever seen, becoming a point of blackness that rippled as it fed and multiplied the power of Rabbit Queen’s vast dietary hatred.

Kamen Rider ZZa’s wheel was grinding furiously. “This is it…have to have perfect timing,” he breathed. Burgermon gave him a thumbs up. Leaning forward like a sprinter, ZZa took off. He ran as fast as he could, covering a hundred meters in 3.6 seconds. The path he ran took him in a spiral, getting bigger with every lap he took, forming a circle.

With an anxious Burgermon at the very center.

Nothing but an orange blur during his sprint, suddenly Kamen Rider ZZa stopped and stabbed the pizza wheel on his arm into the track he’d just run. The energy he’d built up zipped around the spiral he’d run, circling in, faster and faster every second until it hit where Burgermon stood.

He spread his arms wide and twirled up into the air. The spiral of ZZa’s energy started forming shapes everywhere. Pepperoni. Mushrooms. Olives. It was a pizza as big as Rabbit Queen’s apocalyptic salad.

Even the Pizza of Darkness that was amplifying her strength couldn’t stand a chance against it.

The two giant meals collided. Back and forth they pushed each other as if wrestling. Bits fell from the edges, raining down glowing sausage bits and lettuce shreds. At the very center of the confectionary chaos the pair of monsters—Burgermon and Rabbit Queen—grappled, tearing bits out of the giant pizza and salad as they wrestled for supremacy.

And with a final blast of noise and light that made Kamen Rider ZZa turn away in horror at the awesome power, it was over. The sky was clearing up, and Burgermon drifted delicately to the ground close by.

It was only for an instant but ZZa could see Rabbit Queen in the air, dissolving into a purple stream that drifted away into the distance. Out of the haze dropped a sheet of paper, the ends on fire. ZZa watched it hit the ground and let it burn.

“So ends the Pizza of Darkness,” Kamen Rider ZZa murmured.

“What about the recipe?” Burgermon asked, pointing at the flaming paper. “Bibiko wanted that to fix it, didn’t she?”

ZZa waved it off. “It’s better this way. The creation of something that could be such an awesome conduit for evil is not for the eyes of mortal man,” the Rider said with undue solemnity. “Bibi-chan will understand when we tell her.”

“If she even believes we fought a rabbit woman,” Burgermon muttered.

Pulling the game from his Gamer Driver, Kamen Rider ZZa faded and Kibi returned. He smiled and playfully punched Burgermon on the shoulder. “We did a good thing here today.”

And Burgermon nodded his giant burger-covered head. “We defeated the ultimate perversion of the glory of junk food.”

**See you next game**


	7. The Band Breaks Up

**Hey everybody, thanks for taking a look at my little side story! This and the next few chapters happen after Chapter 40 of the main story, where the people who competed in a gaming tournament GENM held got new Rider gear as prizes.**

XXX

A glimmer of light was the last sign of the Corrupture disappearing after the seemingly endless battle.

Kamen Rider Diva turned away from the devastated street where she had been fighting. Thousands of eyes focused on the captivating yellow of her armor, styled like a miniskirt and matching short-sleeved crop top. Atop her mask was a head of fake plastic hair, styled into aquamarine pigtails that day, and hanging off the sides were heart-shaped earrings on small chains of fake pearls.

Dangling from the loops of her silver chain belt was her microphone, the lime green case of her Gashat just visible behind the haft.

The instrument that gave her the power to stand up to Corrupture like she just had.

Diva strode away from the scene of battle on five-inch pink platform shoes. Within seconds she was swarmed by squealing teenagers trying to shake her hand and take pictures with her on their smartphones.

“Hey.”

A soft, annoying sound seemed to echo across a massive distance. But in front, Kamen Rider Diva was obligingly posing with her fans. She waved and made the peace V with her fingers as the phones of her fans captured their meeting with her forever.

“Hey.” The sound came again, louder and even more annoying than the last time. And the time before that.

This time it was joined by a sharp shove between his shoulders.

And he fell off the stool, knocking the tablet showing Kamen Rider Diva’s battle off its stand when his head bumped into it.

“You awake now, Shred?”

Shred stood up, clenching his teeth in rage and combing his shaggy brown hair away from the new bump on his forehead. “You’re dead, Beat,” he growled. Straightening his black vest and ragged jeans, he then picked up the least intimidating object in the studio.

A plastic pink guitar with a bright green neck and head.

Beat sighed and sat down, the lights in the ceiling leaving gleaming spots on his bald scalp. He reached to the sides of his heavy frame and unhooked two green drumsticks, attached to sockets on the sides of his belt by coiling rubber cords. “We’re all ready,” he said, almost sounding tired, and not impressed with Shred’s threat. “Can we try out the game now, like we all came over for?”

In his other hand, Shred had gotten out a Rider Gashat, its case a menacing shade of red. On its label was a rocker in black leather, his muscular arms holding a guitar with flames shooting off its strings. The title, written in flaming letters, said DoReMiFa Rock.

“Don’t forget who won the guitar,” Shred reminded him. “The best player in the world.”

“And I’m the best drummer GENM’s ever seen,” Beat reminded him in return. “We _all_ won that game, and we _all_ came to try it out.”

A string of spastic musical tones interrupted their argument. Both looked over at the one who was already glaring at them, holding up a pink keytar with green keys in his skinny arms. The wild blonde hair falling to his shoulders only served to make the whole spectacle even sillier. “We’re _all_ the best player GENM’s ever seen.”

“And to really get the most out of that game, you need someone who’s mastered every instrument,” said a fourth youth, his brown hair pulled back into a ponytail that hung past the neck of his leather jacket. He held onto a green saxophone, its mouthpiece bright pink.

Shred scowled. Now Keys and Wail were ganging up on him too. Just because he’d been watching Kamen Rider Diva’s latest battle.

Any why not? She’d won a contest like they had. She’d been the best player around of a GENM game, and gotten her own version of the game that let her change into a superhuman. Immediately she’d been able to play that into her ticket to fame. People actually came to see Kamen Rider Diva fight Corrupture when they heard a fight was starting! They stuck around to get a chance to meet her!

Just like Shred would.

If he didn’t have to share his spotlight with a bunch of other gamers.

But if he tried to hold out on them, they might just try and take the Gashat away, and then he wouldn’t have any chance at all. He hit the trigger button with his thumb.

“ **Four-in-one! Pound the beat! Tap the keys! Rock the sax, and swing the axe! All together, bring down the house! DoReMiFa Raaaaaaaawwwwk!!!!** ” it screamed.

Shred locked the game into its slot on his guitar controller and dragged his finger down an artificial string, creating a long grinding power chord. “ **Henshin!** ” Shred yelled.

“ **Henshin!** ” the rest of them echoed.

Streams of energy flowed out of Shred’s guitar, carrying lines and strings of musical notes as they snaked around the studio.

One flowed into the sockets for Beat’s drumsticks, another into the teeth of Keys’s keytar, and the third down the mouthpiece of Wail’s saxophone. All of them flickered white with the power summoned from the game.

The last one spun around the corners of the ceiling, spiraled around the neck of Shred’s guitar before looping over the front and back into where the game was locked in.

He almost screamed at the feeling that covered his body. Not in pain, not in fear.

In excitement as the power solidified into armor around his body. A silver-edged pectoral with a health bar and icons of a guitar and pick wreathed in flames. Running shoes that were red on one foot and yellow on the other. A yellow leather vest formed over his shoulders, and strands of red, blue, and yellow plastic hair atop his mask.

The guitar in his hands shook and expanded into a shining black instrument, stylized flames surrounding the body.

“It worked! It REALLY WORKED!” Shred yelled, then actually jumped, pumped his arm backward in victory and whooped. “I’m a Kamen Rider!”

“And you’re not the only one,” Beat said in a very satisfied voice of his own.

As if he needed to be reminded.

XXX

A passionate strum across the strings.

Rippling waves of power issued from Shred’s transformed guitar, cutting a thick grey storm cloud in half.

It was a power that literally split the sky.

Exactly like he’d been thinking the first time he played DoReMiFa Rock. Even before he entered GENM’s contest to find the best player in the world.

Let alone before Shred found out the prize was getting to be an actual Kamen Rider.

His guitar strings stretched out as noise blared over his shoulder. Sighing behind his mask, he turned to watch Beat pounding on transparent drums and shaking down the fence of the empty lot. The vibrations they made even making the spikes on his wristbands and green leather vest jangle around like Shred’s strings. The top of his mask was as bald as the head underneath, though.

Kamen Rider Wail whipped around the lot blaring on his saxophone, his blue, yellow and red braid whipping out behind him like a rainbow blur over the dull blue of his vest. A blast from his instrument sent an abandoned car spinning over the fence.

“Hey guys,” Kamen Rider Keys warned, “let’s keep it under control, okay?? We don’t want to wreck the whole neighborhood.”

Wail gave him side-eye out of the oversized eyes of his mask. “You haven’t even tried firing yours,” Wail retorted. “How about showing us how it’s done?”

Keys looked right at him, the spike-studded rest vest over his armor and nest of red plastic hair spikes indeed making him look like the most intense member of their little quartet. He held the keytar in front of himself, its keys now a succession of colors the same as the four Riders’ vests.

In a measured voice, he replied, “Blowing things up isn’t the only way to impress an audience. You could try actually being good at reading your audience, and getting them with finesse as a musician.”

“You saying I don’t know anything about how to do that?” Wail asked, but with surprising calm.

Shred and Beat stopped playing their own instruments and looked across the lot at where their bandmates were staring silently at each other. Inside, Shred stifled a chuckle. So it wasn’t him after all. Was everyone in this little group just looking for someone to get annoyed with?

Keys tapped a few of his namesake on his instrument. A string of soft, relaxing notes followed.

Suddenly some rusty car parts on the ground levitated up to the level of his chest and started floating around him in a slanted orbit. The Rider hit a sharp note and the debris he’d been levitating went flying off in different directions. Three pieces flew right beside and between where Wail and Beat were standing, missing them just a few inches.

“What I’m saying,” Keys answered calmly, “is music’s a _precision_ skill. And there’s more to precision than just hitting notes.”

“GENM should’ve let me enter with my _real_ band,” Kamen Rider Beat groaned.

Carelessly tapping the body of his guitar against his hip, Shred asked, “They play the game too?”

Beat sighed in frustration and shook his head, making the light catching on his bald head dance around almost hypnotically. “ _No!_ Half of them think video games are a waste of time!” he answered. “When they found out I was a Kamen Rider now, they all said I’d get killed.” He held up the sticks corded to his belt and looked around at the other Kamen Riders. “I don’t know if they were wrong…”

“HEY!” a voice yelled, and it actually took the quartet of Riders a minute to realize it hadn’t been any of them. A pair of cops were running down the street, hands already on their gun holsters.

Immediately the four Riders scattered as if moving on instinct. Shred, Keys and Wail jumped the fences surrounding the empty lot. As Shred cleared the top, he saw Kamen Rider Beat lowering his head and crashing right through the fence instead.

It looked like everyone else was in the clear, so Shred focused on his own escape. Bracing himself, he jumped to the top of a building three floors high. Obviously no ordinary policeman could copy that feat, but he dashed to the other edge and took another long jump to the roof of the building across the street.

The jumps felt weird, holding onto the neck of his guitar and feeling its weight bobbing behind him attached to his arm as he sailed through the air.

But it felt _good_.

That was where his power came from now. His instrument.

Now, Shred was a Kamen Rider. And Kamen Riders could do anything.

And he had one thing in particular in mind…

XXX

At the horizon, the sun was starting to sink into the sea, turning the water into a pool of bright gold.

Kamen Rider Shred’s eyes stared straight into it. He bumped his leg lightly off the corner of the building where he was sitting, trying to figure out what the first step in his plan should be. He’d had twenty ideas already, but after a while had to admit to himself that all of them were pointless.

The worst were flat-out stupid.

He leaned back on his hands and looked up at the sky, leaned forward and looked out at the ocean again. He stood up and picked up his guitar, then sat back down again. No, he couldn’t give up until he had a plan.

Something to get the attention of Kamen Rider Diva.

This was his first shot at something big in his entire life. He had to be smart about it, or he might be stuck living like a nobody his whole life.

Even if he _was_ a Kamen Rider now.

“You come up here for the view a lot?” a melodic voice asked from over Shred’s shoulder. Immediately he was on his feet, grabbing his guitar and aiming it like a rifle at the source of the voice. It was only then that Shred realized he didn’t have any enemies.

What he saw then was an even bigger realization for Kamen Rider Shred.

Because there she was, Kamen Rider Diva. Her fake hair had been styled into a yellow and green braid, and the earrings hanging down were a star and crescent moon. There was still no mistaking her.

She didn’t even seem to notice Shred aiming the guitar at her. With a long, captivating strut, she walked around him to the edge of the rooftop. “Don’t blame you. It’s a hell of a view. A person could get lost looking out there real easy.”

Shred stood up and tried to say something. His voice just wouldn’t come. Another instinct tried to take over and he shifted his hands to the neck of his guitar. To play something that’d impress her. His hands wouldn’t move.

Regardless, when Kamen Rider Diva glanced over her shoulder her eyes seemed attracted to the instrument he was holding. They traced back to the Rider Gashat socketed in the back, and she gasped adorably in surprise.

“What game’s that?” Kamen Rider Diva asked in her melodious voice.

“What?” replied Kamen Rider Shred, who couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to say. Once it had left his mouth, he caught himself and spent a few precious seconds throwing a hurricane of mental swears at himself. “Oh, that one! Oh yeah, sorry, I ah…it’s kind of part of me now, you know? Sometimes I sort of forget it’s there, if you know what I mean.”

Diva bounced up and landed on her spike heel shoes with perfect poise. “Oooh! Yeah, that’s _exactly_ how it is with me and my mic!” she said, holding up the microphone with a Gashat of her own proudly sticking out of the handle. “That’s so cool…I didn’t think you’d relate to your game the same way as me.”

Shred’s mind felt like it was melting out his ears as he heard that. “Wait, you’ve been looking forward to meeting me?” he asked, his voice coming out with an edge of a dry rasp.

She giggled at him. “Sure! You’re the guy who won the contest for the best guitar player on DoReMiFa Rock, right?” Diva leaned over and scanned her game again, then nodded her head. “That’s the game you got in your guitar, yeah! I won the contest for DoReMiFa Idol!”

“I know!” Shred answered, so loud Diva took a step backward in surprise. “I’ve seen all your battles online! I know everything about them!”

“Oh my god!” Diva gushed back. “You’re a fan?!”

“Definitely!” Shred declared, unable to quite believe this was all happening to him.

Diva held her microphone in front of her face and squealed. “That’s awesome! You totally have to introduce me to the rest of your band!”

Everything stopped all of a sudden. It was like someone had slammed on the brakes for the entire world. Shred held onto his guitar with rigid fingers that refused to move. In his mouth his tongue was totally still.

“This is so great!” she went on, somehow free of the time warp that had caught Shred in its awesome paralyzing power. “I was hoping I’d get a chance to meet you guys, but I didn’t realize you lived so close to me!” She held out her phone, signaling him to exchange numbers. Shred still couldn’t move, so she scribbled something down and held it out for Shred, but when he still didn’t respond she just chuckled and stuck it into one of the frozen hands holding his guitar controller. “Call me! We’ll set something up!” Diva giggled as she somehow jogged to the edge of the roof in her needle-thin heels. “I bet we all sound awesome together!”

Then she took a flying leap to the next rooftop, then the next, until she was just a black dot disappearing into the setting sun.

Shred was still too frozen with horror at what she’d said to move.

XXX

“What’s happening?”

“I think you know,” Beat answered. Right before their Rider armor disappeared with a disapproving buzzer sound going off.

Overhead a grey screen appeared. Words crawled across it.

CONNECTION DROPPED.

“Figures!” Keys moaned. “We have to stay close to that punk or we lose our power! What were those guys thinking when they made that game?!”

Wail tooted loudly on his sax, and the other two young men looked back at him. “If I could say so, my friends, we weren’t exactly too friendly with him, either. Kind of in a hurry to get to see how strong our power made us, wouldn’t you say?”

Neither of them answered him, but both looked down the street, hanging their heads for a second and sighing in frustration. “That still doesn’t change how stupid it is for only one guy to have his own game!” Keys insisted.

Wail blew into his instrument again. “Wow, I need to check the reed on this thing,” he said. A minute later Wail suggested, “Maybe it’s the whole point of the game? Maybe we all came into this just thinking about how cool it’d be to be a superhero? Not just Shred.”

“What are you saying we should’ve been instead?” Beat asked.

Resting his sex on his shoulder, Wail shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. A band?”

“Did someone say _a band_?!” a bombastic voice seemed to drop out of the sky on top of them. The trio froze and looked around, scanning everywhere for the voice’s owner. A devious chuckle came from behind them, and all of them whipped around to see someone standing between them. All three jumped back.

Immediately the three of them had to resist an urge to shield their eyes. His complexion was dark, but his clothes were blinding. It was like a purple explosion had gone off right in front of their eyes. When their vision finally cleared they still almost had to look away from all the dazzling purple sequins covering his cape and hat, the same color as the jewel topping his shiny black cane. He flashed a smile at them that was a dazzling curl of white, below a pair of sunglasses so dark Keys was afraid he was being sucked into them.

“Who’re you?” Beat demanded.

“And did you actually leave the house like that?!” Keys snorted.

Ignoring the insult magnificently, the man flipped his cape over his shoulder and hold out a fan of business cards. “My name’s Sol. Liss. Sol Liss. Agent to the _stars_ , baby! You want fans? I’ll get you fans! You want to be your own act? Just name your terms, baby!”

Keys was the first to step away. “I don’t need an agent, I need my own game. Talk to you guys later. We’ll figure out what the smart thing to is about Shred, okay?”

Sol chuckled. “Oh, don’t be like that!” Then a menacing crimson glow appeared in his eyes. “Stick with me and I’ll get you all the fan you ever wanted,” he said, a menacing reverberation echoing in their ears.

XXX

That night Shred stared at his guitar controller in accusation as he lay in bed.

How could things have gone so right, and then immediately have gone so _wrong_?

“Diva…why do you need to meet my band?” Shred moaned. “Why do I even have to have a band? I’m as good as any Rider there’s ever been… _and_ a better musician than any Rider there’s ever been.”

Depressed, he folded his arms behind his head and wondered what to do. Sure, he could always do the honest thing, he guessed, and tell the other three about Kamen Rider Diva wanting to meet all of them. Sure, they’d gotten on his case when he’d been watching her latest victory, but they’d want to meet another Kamen Rider who wanted to work with them, right?

Then again…why did any of those jerks need to know that Shred had gotten to meet her? The real, the one of a kind, Kamen Rider Diva. Maybe Shred could just tell her the other Kamen Riders weren’t professional enough to stick around when they found out their powers were tied to _his_ game. He’d been left to protect the territory all by himself…who wouldn’t respect somebody that brave?

Suddenly Shred sat up in his bed. From outside came a horrible shrieking sound. Something pounding and driving like some jerk who’d cranked up the bass on his car stereo, but high and piercing like amp feedback. He ran to the window and flung it open to try and see what was going on.

Immediately Shred was knocked off his feet by the awesome force of the discordant sound coming from outside. He wouldn’t even profane the word “music” comparing that toxic noise to it. Just before he was knocked over, he’d seen spotlights raking the sky over the roofs of the buildings.

And with noise that loud and awful around, Shred had a feeling he knew what was going on…

XXX

Its engine sputtered a few times, but Shred’s old motorcycle finally roared to life and he leaned hard as he took around the corner at top speed.

There was no time to waste. Half the city probably knew about whatever was going, even though Shred’s neighbor probably thought it was just late-night practice.

If half the city knew about whatever was going on, then Kamen Rider Diva almost had to know about it too. And she needed to see him there, at whatever was going on to make so much of that terrible noise.

There wasn’t far to go, it turned out. After only a few blocks the street had been cleared, cars upended and dropped into messy piles sticking up from all angles. They’d been moved to make room for a wide white concert stage, where the spotlights Shred had seen sweeping the sky from his window were mounted on the front corners. Stacks of speakers lined the back edge of the stage, where the horrible blasts of random sound were coming from.

In front of a row of sinuous backup dancers with shiny purple heads shaped like viruses, was a band of three armor-clad musicians. The eyes of their masks were big and cartoony, like any Kamen Rider’s, but a menacing purple glow seemed to _flow_ behind them.

A short, stocky one wearing green and banging away on transparent drums floating in the air in front of him.

A tall thin one with a chaotically colored braid contrasting his vibrant blue armor, and blasting away on a saxophone with a smiling fireball painted on the side. Short spikes lined the rim of the bell.

Last was a musician in red, playing on a keytar designed to look like a demon’s face, and predictably the keys were its teeth.

Shred slipped off his bike and unslung the guitar from his back. He triggered its Gashat and was about to load it when suddenly, the horrible “music” the bad was playing stopped.

All three of them were staring right at Shred. Even the backup dancers had stopped and were pointing the fronts of their inhuman heads in his direction. “That’s _just_ what this combo needs!” a voice sang. “An axeman to front us!”

A man in an absurd purple suit suddenly seemed to appear in the corner of Shred’s eye. He lifted his impossibly dark sunglasses, and his eyes were swimming with the same weird purple light as in the musicians’ masks.

“Not a chance!” Shred yelled and loaded his game much too hard. He strummed the neck of his guitar and in a flash, he was a Kamen Rider.

“Aw, buddy, you should’na done that,” Sol Liss said, more amused than scared. “I made them an offer, and they all took it,” he said, gesturing to the trio of musicians. “That’s right, look familiar?”

Shred jumped back and aimed his guitar at the Corrupture, clearly willing to use it. Sol just smirked. “Boy, I convinced all of them…what makes you think I can’t convince you too?” he asked in a voice full of quiet menace.


	8. The Band Gets Together

It was true.

Kamen Rider Shred scanned the three armored musicians. The drummer in green, spikes looking like monster’s teeth covering his shoulders and down his arms. Sax player in blue, a long braid hanging down the back of his head that almost seemed to writhe slightly like a living thing. Keyboardist in red, strands of hair falling down from the top of his mask that looked more like tiny flexible blades the long Shred looked at them.

But he didn’t have to look at them for long. He recognized them easily as the other contest winners. The ones who’d been arguing with him about not being a team player.

“What’d you do to them?” Shred demanded.

Sol Liss shrugged his shoulders, a serene look on the Corrupture’s face despite the deadly guitar Shred was aiming at him. “They wanted to be a righteous combo, my dude,” Sol replied. “The guy who had the game was hogging the power all to himself, so I just did ‘em a little favor and let them have power on their own. And they’re making beautiful, _beautiful_ music!” He whipped around to face the silent stage.

And extended an accusing finger at them, hissing purple sparks jumping on the end. “Hey, nobody told you to stop!” Sol Liss snarled at them. Immediately they started on their instruments again, and immediately the air was full of that hideous noise that’d knocked Shred to the floor back in his apartment.

It almost did again, but he struck a series of hard power chords on his guitar. They blasted through the air, shaking the windows around Shred, and _almost_ overwhelmed the terrible storm of sound the other musicians were making.

Again all three of them stared Shred down, but kept banging away on their instruments with the furious look Sol Liss was giving them. “See what you think of some _real_ music!” Shred screamed over his own wailing guitar. He dragged his pick up and down the artificial strings, sending a wavering beam that looked like bars and notes ripping across the stage.

Beat, Keys and Wail fired back with beams just like Shred’s from their own instruments. The musical beams pushed against each other, but the other three’s combined attack quickly overwhelmed Shred’s. He gasped and jumped backward but was still sent flying as the blast exploded.

Shred’s feet hit the ground and he skidded until he slammed into the side of a skyscraper. When he shook his head to clear his vision and looked back at the stage, Beat, Wail and Keys were back to playing and ignoring him while the virus-heads danced and twirled behind them.

But there was one person who wasn’t ignoring Kamen Rider Shred. It was Sol Liss, the band’s Corrupture manager. Purple sparks were jumping from his outstretched finger again, and one as big as Shred’s head shot straight at him. “Show me how good you are, dude!” he sang. “Maybe I can still find a spot for you in the band!”

“You’re gonna be sorry you asked me for that!” Shred yelled and _shredded_ the chords on his guitar. A blast of notes and bars lanced from the head.

And _shredded_ right through the manager’s attack.

The musical blast kept going, still glowing with enough power to threaten Sol Liss. The Corrupture just smirked, snapped his fingers, and Beat suddenly stopped pounding his drums and jumped in front Sol Liss.

An explosion erupted that swept back from where Beat had set himself up as a human shield, almost getting back far enough to touch Sol. A tiny fireball landed on the sleeve of his jacket, but he casually reached over and crushed it between his fingers. The smirk on his face got even nastier when Beat stood up, his legs shaking underneath him and plumes of smoke still rising from his armor.

“You just gonna stand there and let other people protect you?!” Shred taunted.

The response he got was a cruel laugh. “Yeah! Protecting me’s part of what they need to do to pay back the power I let them have! That and the best music in the business!”

Suddenly a streak of bright but oddly synchronizing colors came flying down from above and knocked Sol Liss down. He rolled several times, purple sequins coming off his jacket and bouncing off the eyes of Kamen Rider Shred’s mask. He wasn’t paying much attention to what’d happened to the villain, though: Shred’s eyes were on the surprising attacker instead, and just like he’d been expecting, standing there was the immaculate Kamen Rider Diva!

“She got me right with the pointy part of that heel!” Sol Liss complained. Even Shred couldn’t help cringing just a little; the points of Diva’s stiletto heels looked even sharper than when he’d just seen her. Was that really a metal file sticking out of the back of her oversized but stylish belt…?

“You haven’t even heard me sing yet!” Diva laughed, twirling her microphone over her wrist. She brought it up to her face. The three band members tensed to fight.

But Sol Liss jumped to the stage and held up his finger to sky. “Ah, no! I seen everything I needed to see!” he interrupted before a fight could start for real. “Now we hit the bigtime, boys, and spread our message of _MUSIC_!!!” Around him the stage was starting to disintegrate into a purple blob.

Kamen Rider Shred took aim with his guitar and hit the sharpest chord, but it was too late. Already the stage was gone, whirling up out of sight. Gone with it were the band, and even the virus-head backup dancers. The chaotically-stacked cars and damage to the street left no doubt the Corrupture and their controlled band had been there, though.

No, Shred realized. Not controlled.

Corrupted.

“Damn, I’ve got to go after them!” Shred grumbled. A ring of square icons came out from the Gashat on his guitar and he was about to tap one, when…

“It is true?”

Shred froze like a statue. It was Kamen Rider Diva’s voice.

“Is what he said true? Were those the other winners? Did they make a deal with him because you didn’t want to share the power of your game?!” she demanded.

Shred lowered his guitar, feeling like he’d been impaled.

“What makes you think he said anything like that?” he asked cautiously. It was all he could think to do.

Diva held her microphone out toward him. “This is the most powerful microphone ever made. It can pick up sounds from miles away. I heard the whole conversation you and he were having,” she answered, rage starting to tinge her voice.

“We won the contests, but we never met till just a little while ago,” Shred replied limply. His mind was still processing actually getting to meet his idol, and all the possibilities that might lead to. Sparing the mental runtime to explain about the other Riders who got powers from his game hadn’t come up yet…

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kamen Rider Diva demanded.

Shred shrugged helplessly. “We’re not exactly a real band, we haven’t hung out or practiced anything! I don’t even know their real names! Just their Kamen Rider names!”

Still, she pointed past him to where the purple blob was flying away. “But how bad do things have to be for them to say yes to powers from a game monster??” she accused.

“I don’t know! I just—” Shred started to say, but Diva walked around him. “Wait, where are you going?”

“After them, obviously. I have to help those people in trouble, or at least stop them before they can do any damage with the power that Corrupture gave them,” Diva answered.

He started to jog up to her, but she held up her hand. “This is too important, and there’s no time to talk it over. I can’t risk bringing someone along if I can’t trust them.” Shaking her head, she broke into a run—in her high heels—and then took a giant leap off the roof. Diva disappeared out of sight after the Corrupture blob.

Shred walked to the edge of the roof, kicked the concrete lip and growled in rage.

“How can something as stupid as this be happening?!” he yelled, his voice echoing across the rooftops. He almost kicked himself as he realized Diva probably heard that too, but sighed when he figured out that at that point, it didn’t matter anymore. Diva thought he was the one who’d treated the other three so bad, they’d said yes when a Corrupture said he could give them powers instead.

And was the truth really that much better?

Shred _had_ been ignoring the rest of the band. He’d only looked at the Gashat he’d been given and seen it as a chance to get Kamen Rider Diva’s attention. He’d thought that having a Kamen Rider’s powers was what he needed to be worthy of someone so amazing.

And idiotic thoughts like that had made Shred miss two incredibly important things.

DoReMiFa Rock was a game that was supposed to be played with friends. Shred hadn’t even tried to get to know the other Riders. Hadn’t even tried to help them come together as a band. He’d completely failed to understand not just the point of games, but one about a _band_.

But the second thing he hadn’t figured out was even worse.

It wasn’t being a Kamen Rider that made him worth Diva’s time.

There had been bad Kamen Riders. Ones who were evil incarnate. But there had been so many who’d been heroes. Amazing men who’d done such brave, unbelievable things. Shred had a chance to be one who was a real hero.

And holding onto that thought as tight as he could, Kamen Rider Shred summoned up a collection of icons, this time putting his fist through one with a determined punch.

XXX

The purple blob kept shrinking farther and farther out of sight, but Kamen Rider Diva held tight onto her microphone and concentrated all of her power into it. Its trail of colorful notes came brighter and bigger, propelling her faster after the retreating Corrupture.

It all seemed a little suspicious to her, however…If they were as powerful as they’d seemed, why weren’t they leaving her behind more easily? Maybe they were toying with her. Why would they have been making a big show in the middle of the street, then run away without even trying to accomplish anything?

Unless it was a trap.

She spotted something out of the corner of her eye then, and tensed as the yellow blur came speeding up to her.

Except it wasn’t a Corrupture, it was a Kamen Rider surfing along on a trail of musical bars, warbling away on a guitar controller. It was Kamen Rider Shred.

“I thought I told you to stay behind!” Diva hissed at him, obviously irritated. Shred chuckled, and she clenched her teeth. “What’s so funny??”

“Kamen Riders aren’t allowed to stay home when there’s trouble, right?” Shred replied. “And they’re supposed to set an example, too. Least that’s what I heard.”

Diva stared right through him for a second. Shred looked back at her but turned to face forward and played even faster. “If you’re trying to impress me, it’ll take more than saying you’re sorry,” she said, and faced ahead.

He shrugged. “Yeah. Guess I’ll just have to prove it,” Shred chuckled.

Kamen Rider Diva looked over at him again, but Shred was starting to get ahead of her.

She’d have to keep an eye on him after all. But…maybe it would be good to have a partner.

XXX

Only a few minutes later the Corrupture blob started to come down near the edge of town. It hit the ground with a loud SPLAT, but then started to reform itself into something huge.

The base of another stage sprang up with a half-dome framing the back, rows of lights hanging from a rig near the top. Rows and rows of seats sprang up in front of it.

In every seat was a Corrupture Cell, one of the virus-headed beings, just waiting for the show to start. Hovering in the air were cameras with buzzing insect-like wings.

Standing on the stage was Sol Liss, the diabolical manager, himself. He had pulled down his sunglasses to see better, an ugly purple static covering his eyes. He blinked, held his eyes closed for a second, then opened them again. Instead of what his own eyes were pointed at, he could see the stage from the angle of one of the hovering cameras. Another blink, his vision shifted to the view from another camera. A last blink and he’d reviewed the feed from all of them.

“Perfect dynamics. People’ll be able to see _everything_ once the show starts,” Sol Liss said with a grin. “And after that, they’ll never want to see anything else again…”

With a swing of his sequin-covered arm, Sol Liss turned to his band. The three musicians were standing around, shapely female Corrupture Cells fawning over them, stroking their muscles and chins. “Hey! You three psyched up for your first big concert, or what?” Sol demanded of the three musicians.

“Where’s the groupies?” Beat asked in a robotic-sounding monotone.

“You get to hang out with the groupies _after_ the show, and bands only get groupies if they’re good,” Sol barked at them. “So get out there and let’s see some frigging hustle!”

Rushing past him with a speed created from fear, the band ran out onto the stage and spread out. Behind them came the Cells who’d just been entertaining them, fanning out into their dance positions.

Beat went first, slamming out a few loud notes on his drums that could only be seen for the second his sticks hit them. Wail lived up to his name by sending out a painful blast on his saxophone. Meanwhile, Keys unslung his keytar and tapped out a few experimental notes to gauge the acoustics of the stage. As he did he was sure he saw a pair of shooting stars or something, that disappeared after they zipped behind the edge of a building.

Through the foggy filter his mind had taken since seeing Sol Liss’s contract, Keys realized he should’ve thought something like that was weird. Something he should’ve warned his boss about.

But his boss had told them to get warmed up for the big show. And if they wanted to have special powers, they’d better learn to shut up and earn them.

A block away, Kamen Rider Diva and Shred had landed. She was looking back at the dome of the Corrupture’s stage, making a thoughtful sound in her throat as she did. “There’s so many Corrupture. I don’t like those odds,” she muttered, half to herself, half to Shred.

“Then we have to change the odds,” Shred pointed out.

Diva turned back to look at him. “You have a plan to do that?”

Shred looked her straight in the oversized eyes. “I think I do, if you don’t mind helping me out with vocals.”

“Vocals are what I do best,” Diva replied.

A little chortle was Shred’s answer, surprising. “I know,” he told her.

Back on the stage, Wail stepped to the center and a pair of bright white spotlights trained on him from different sides of the lighting rig. The audience fell completely silent, waiting for the musician.

He took a bow in front of them, holding his saxophone controller to his chest. “Folks, you have no idea how humbled I feel to see such a big turnout to our first little show,” Wail said, the prescripted feel-good line he’d been given scrolling across his mind like a machine. Scattered—but loud—pockets of cheering erupted from the audience. “We hope you’ll have as good a time as we are playing for you, and I speak for the whole Corrupture Combo when I say that.” More cheering, louder, and from all over the stands that time.

With the spectators all warmed up for the show, Wail asked, “How about we start off the night with that hit by the Hormones, ‘Purple Skin’?”

XXX

Sitting on a bench in front of her office, a cubicle worker was shocked when the video she’d been watching on her table suddenly turned into a wall of purple static. It crackled at her like a snake’s hiss for a split-second before showing the Corrupture concert. She held her hands over hear ears and squealed in pain.

It was nothing compared to the sound she made when a cloud of purple smoke gushed out of her screen.

All over town the same thing was happening to anyone in front of a screen. Whatever they were watching turned to the concert of the Corrupture trio, and purple smoke jetted out to cover them. Almost to a one they fell to the ground, clutching their faces.

Their fingers throbbing with purple veins.

XXX

Horrible noise blasted from the stage, the three corrupted musicians waving back and forth to their own terrible beats. Behind them, the Cells danced to a rhythm only they could detect out of the noise.

Overhead the sky was starting to ripple and distort from the awful power of the music, twisting into a whirlpool with a forbidding purple glow at the center. Violet sparkles were drifting down, into the lenses of the flying cameras broadcasting the concert. Spreading the touch of the Corrupture to the owner of every screen for miles.

Windows rattled in their casings and on the sides of abandoned cars from the horrific music. Small spiderwebs of cracks formed in the ground around the stands where their Corrupture fans sat, cheering the evil sound the band’s “song” made as if it was brilliant music after all. The Cells lifted their arms up into the air to show their support, even as the power of the song seemed to be rotting the very environment around them.

As the concert kept going, Sol Liss watched with a wicked smile. The power they were building up with their “song”, since even he knew better than to call it that, was incredible. But it wasn’t enough.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Sol yelled at the trio, “Play louder, punks! We need to take over more screens, and spread the virus farther! Think of all the fans you’ll have if you can pull that off, huh?!”

Beat nodded in understanding and started to pound his transparent drums faster. His shoulders and arms were aching something hideous from the strain, but his foggy mind told him to stay quiet and deal with the pain. This was his big break, after all. If he didn’t give it everything he had, another one would probably never come around…

And so when he heard another loud sound starting up nearby, starting to slightly drown out the song his band was playing, Beat felt himself getting annoyed. It was another song. A loud, fast shredding of notes on a guitar.

Shred…why did that word sound familiar to him?

The song seeming to fight against their band’s got louder. Suddenly the guitar died down and a woman started singing: “On a cold winter morning, in the time before the light…in flames of death’s eternal reign, we ride toward the fight!”

Corrupture Cell spectators looked around, seeming confused. But it was impossible even for the bandmembers to tell what the virus-headed creatures were thinking just from a look. A few of them in the back suddenly squealed in surprise as someone charged down the aisle. Huge eyes adorned the front of his mask, hands holding tightly onto the neck of a guitar as he ran, belting out notes at high speed.

It was Kamen Rider Shred.

And he wasn’t alone, as the voice sang out, louder than last time: “When the darkness has fallen down, and the time are tough alright, the sound of evil laughter falls around the world tonight!”

Black-shirted security Corrupture Cells ran out to intercept the Kamen Rider attacking the stage. Shred went into a spinning kick, smashing their huge round heads with the toes of his gaudy-colored track shoes. Splats from the hard kicks made it to Beat’s ears over the noise of his band’s “song”.

Beat felt an urge to wince in pain through his fogged mind. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wail actually stop playing for a second and flinch at the sound of the “splat”.

And behind them, Sol Liss was clenching his teeth in fury.

“Hey!” he yelled at them, holding up paper contracts in both hands. “If you get upstaged, I’m ripping up your contracts!” Sol threatened. “You don’t want to think about what happens if you don’t deliver the hits!”

“Ha! I’m sure glad you’re not my manager!” Kamen Rider Shred taunted him.

Sol Liss turned to look at Shred, whisking the contracts into his jacket. “You’ll wish I was in a minute, _human_ ,” Sol hissed at Shred. “You could’ve lived, then.”

“Like _them_?” Shred retorted, waving the head of his guitar at the trio of musicians, still shrieking ugly noises on their instruments. “That isn’t living! What kind of freak could think that was good?!”

An unsettling sneer appeared on Sol’s face. “The new dominant species,” he replied, and lowered his sunglasses to fire beams from his eyes Shred’s chest.

But suddenly the woman’s voice sang out again: “Fighting hard, fighting on for the steel, through the wastelands evermore!~ The scattered souls will feel the hell, bodies wasting on the shores!” A barrage of shining musical notes came between Sol’s beams and Shred.

Sol Liss looked over in a rage, but his mouth dropped in surprise at what he saw. Kamen Rider Diva stood on the back of a chair in the stands, the Cell spectator sitting in it knocked out. How she managed to balance on the back of a stadium seat in high heels defied belief.

Her opponent didn’t have a chance to think about that for long; she sang into her microphone and sent another barrage of notes at the Corrupture. While she was keeping Sol busy, Shred pointed his guitar at Beat, still banging away on his see-through drums. And he started playing along with the song that Diva was singing again.

XXX  
  


Only one thought was occupying Beat’s mind: living up to his dream of playing for a huge audience. He couldn’t even see the back of the crowd in front of the stage. All of them there to listen to him play.

They were cheering at the top of the gurgling voices. Beat knocked out the hardest, most exciting rhythm he could. It was the only professional thing to do to reward the crowd for their loyalty…

But another sound reached his ears. Someone else playing another song. A louder, more exciting song than the one Beat and his bandmates were playing. And more than that, Beat felt a weird vibration in the sticks held tightly in his hands. He was still drumming, but realized that he wasn’t drumming along to the other song now. The more exciting one…

And suddenly, it felt like his head had burst open. He could see, hear, _feel_ more clearly than he ever had in his life. The bright purple on the heads of the Corrupture Cells in the stands. The light catching on the lenses of the hovering cameras in front of the stage. The assault on Beat’s eyes that was Kamen Rider Diva’s multi-colored armor as she fired music notes at a man in a twinkling purple suit.

Most of all, the sweet, sweet notes being played by the one in the red armor so bright it almost shined. Someone Beat recognized. Shred.

His guitar was glowing white, he was playing it so hard and so fast. In a flash, Beat’s drum sticks were glowing white with the same incredible power. With every slam against his see-through drums Beat’s head got clearer and clearer, and he quickly realized what he needed to do:

Share the power of the Kamen Riders’ song with the other musicians, to free them from the Corrupture’s control.

Beat and Shred turned to face Keys and Wail, whose instruments also started glowing white. Instead of the hideous noise they’d been creating, it was the intense song, the _amazing_ song Shred and Diva had been playing.

And in that moment, they were free.

Pieces of their amor cracked and sloughed off their bodies, melting into puddles of purple goo when they hit the floor. Keys gagged in disgust and shouldered his keytar and slapped a few small blobs clinging to his bare arms. “I said yes to being covered in that crap?!” he demanded of nobody in particular.

“We didn’t agree to anything, remember?” Wail countered with another question. “That freak shot light out of his eyes and hypnotized before we answered his questions.”

“I’m…still sorry for trying to hog the game,” Shred said, looking down at his suit’s neon running shoes. “It’s a game a bunch of people are supposed to play together.” A drum stick tapped the bottom of his chin and lifted Shred’s face up, so the three of them could look him in the eye.

Beat spoked up first. “Not people, dude. Friends.”

“What? Just like that?” Shred asked.

At first Beat shrugged. Then suddenly he smirked. “Well, we can give it a try, can’t we?”

An explosion from behind interrupted them. Kamen Rider Diva had been blown off her perch in the stands. In midair she somersaulted to get her legs back underneath her and hit the ground, skidding on her high heels but rising back to her full height.

“You actually met Kamen Rider Diva?” Wail asked in utter disbelief.

“Talk later! Now, we play!”

Wail nodded. “Let’s do what we should’ve done before: band together!”

Keys groaned. “That was the worst joke I ever heard!”

Striking a powerful chord that reverberated across the stage, Shred yelled out, “ **Henshin!** ”

XXX

Focusing her giant anime eyes on her opponent, Kamen Rider Diva raised her microphone to her mouth. “Ladaaaaa!” It was simple, but it did what she needed. Once again Diva sang into her microphone and sent a cascade of large notes flying out in Sol Liss’s direction. The Corrupture opened his mouth, but suddenly his jaw stretched almost down to his waist, exposing a huge mouth full of rows of fangs and a black forked tongue a few feet long.

He _roared_ , and a blast of purple and black musical notes shot out and met Diva’s. There was a horrendous cacophony of sound and both clusters of notes were gone.

That wasn’t even the most shocking thing that was happening. Bits of Sol Liss were breaking off and shattering on the ground like little pieces of porcelain. Underneath patches of dark purple scales were showing through his disguise.

“That figures,” Kamen Rider Diva said. “You have to wear a mask to trick anybody into thinking you’re someone respectable.”

“That’s how managers are, sweetie!” Sol Liss growled, his mask cracking over one eye and falling away, showing a glowing red eye the size of a baseball underneath. “We lay on the charm and we take our cut after we get the talent a big gig…what’s so wrong with that?!”

Diva didn’t answer but took a step back, and tightened her grip on her microphone. He threw his arms wide. All four of them. Bat-like wings hung down from them among the tatters of his sequin-spangled jacket. Sol’s human mask finished cracking and falling away, revealing a strange fish-like face with a wide mouth full of needle-like teeth, but topped with tall bat-like ears.

“If you think about it,” he said, his voice distorted into a roar with the loss of his disguise, “ _I’m_ the one doing the real work!”

But Diva still didn’t answer. Instead, she chortled as she looked over the monstrous Sol’s shoulder. Part of him knew better than to let himself be distracted in the middle of a battle, but another part knew not to let himself be taken by surprise. He half-turned to his side and looked behind him. Back at the stage.

Where four Kamen Riders, looking back at him with their typical giant eyes and brandishing musical instruments, were standing. Piled all around them were the unconscious forms of the Corrupture Cells who’d been given to them as backup dancers and groupies.

Given to them by _him_.

In the blink of an eye the monstered-out Sol Liss held a stack of papers in each clawed hand. “You’re still under contract!” he shouted at them.

“Don’t worry, handsome!” Kamen Rider Shred shouted back. “You want a song, we’ll give you one, right??”

Keys hit a few notes on his keytar. Beat banged out an intense solo that brought dust raining down from the roof of the stage. In contrast to their blaring sounds, Keys played a soft string of notes on his instrument. “We’re ready,” Wail answered for the whole band. He tucked his saxophone under one arm and bowed dramatically. “And we’d be honored to have you join our performance, my lady.”

An amazed glance passed between Beat and Shred, but Keys nodded lightly in approval.

Diva broke into a run and vaulted over the head of the Corrupture band manager. She landed with perfect poise in front of the other Riders and twirled her microphone in her hand. “I’d be delighted, boys!” she chirped.

Growling in frustration, Sol Liss launched himself into the air, all four wings spread wide. “You were given that power to spread something glorious, and you’re just gonna throw it all away?!” he demanded. “Then I’ll have to throw _you_ all away and find someone who deserves it!”

In a hideous droning voice, he droned, “ _You have no idea what it takes to make it in this industry! Bet you think just knowing how to play a few songs makes you a star! What do you know about booking gigs or negotiating with record execs?”_

Below him the band slumped, his speech numbing their minds and draining strength from their arms. But Beat lifted his drum sticks over his head and hit them together. “Five! Six! Seven! Eight!” he yelled, then started hitting his drums in a flurry. Sol Liss was still flapping his lips, but his demotivating speech was drowned out by the drumbeat.

“All together now!” Diva yelled over the pounding drums.

“ **DoReMiFa Critical Crescendo!** ” announced the game locked into Shred’s guitar, as all four of them launched into the song he and Diva had been playing before.

Clenching the microphone tight, Diva burst into the next part of the lyrics, “On the blackest plains in Hell’s domains, we watch them as they go! Through the fire and pain and once again we knoooooow!

“Now we fly ever free…we’re free before the thunderstorm! On toward the wilderness, our quest carries on!” Kamen Rider Diva sang with all her energy. Shred, Beat, and Keys played along with the song so hard their hands turned into blurs in front of their guitar, drums and keytar. Wail blared on his saxophone even though the song didn’t include one, just to add his power.

Overhead Sol Liss was still circling, yelling at them about how he knew best, but his words were completely overpowered by the Kamen Riders’ song. Skinny cracks were forming across his body, lavender light seeping out.

Filled with confidence that their assault was working, Diva went into the climax of her number. “Far beyond the sundown! Far beyond the moonlight! Deep inside our hearts and all our _sooooouuuuuuullls_!!”

“So far away, we wait for the day…for the lives all so wasted and gone…we feel the pain of a lifetime lost in a thousand days… _through the fire and the flames, we carry on!!_ ”

Then she and the rest of the band raised their instruments. Her microphone, Shred’s guitar, Beat’s drum sticks, Keys’ keytar and Wail’s sax. All five fired a beam that converted on one point, combining into one massive laser throwing out shining musical notes as it slammed into Sol Liss.

“…better listen to what I tell you if you want to make in…this…business…” he gurgled, then disintegrated into a purple blob. It hovered in midair, then spiraled out of sight.

All around the band, the unconscious Corrupture Cells who’d been their backup dancers were dissolving and flying away after the remains of Sol Liss. In the stands, the Cells who’d been spectators were screeching as they dissolved into the sky like the rest.

But the Kamen Riders quickly saw it wasn’t just happening around them. From around the edges and roofs of buildings, more thin streams of purple twisted their way into the sky.

“What’s going on?” Shred asked.

“It’s the victims,” Beat said solemnly. “The people who saw the concert and got infected by the Corrupture virus that he transmitted through the broadcast. Now they’re going to join the other Corrupture.”

Silently, the band watched as the countless purple strands weaved away.

XXX

It seemed like days had passed since the end of the battle, but night had only set over them as they walked slowly away from the stage. It was already crumbling back into nothing behind them.

All of them were completely silent, with Diva being the first to remove her game and flicker back into the ordinary person she was underneath. If that word really applied to someone like her; her hair was tied into alternating green and yellow braids just like had been on her mask. Although the heels on her shoes were a much more realistic height. Her skin was an exotic brown, contrasting with the rainbow of colors in her hair, her contact lenses, lipstick and fingernails.

Kamen Rider Shred stop where he was walking and quivered at the sight of Diva in person, out of her armor. Keys didn’t notice he’d stopped and bounced off him, staggering back. Wail and Beat chuckled at both of them.

“Those Corrupture got a lot of people infected today,” Diva sighed. She looked at the rest of the band with a hardened gaze. “But I’m not going to let them get anymore, and I’m going to get those people back.”

All four locked their eyes on Shred, who pulled the game out of his guitar controller. Their armor faded out with a “ **GASHUUN** ” that sounded almost defeated. Shred immediately spoke up: “In a way, this is kind of my fault. Maybe if I’d been more open to forming a band, instead of thinking this was my chance to meet a celebrity,” he said, eying the unmasked Diva for a second, “well, maybe things wouldn’t have had a chance to get this bad. I’m looking to start a band to make things better, though. Call it a charity tour if you want…you guys in?”

“I mean, I guess,” Wail said, but smirked.

“Fine, but I’m coming up with the name for it,” Keys added.

Shred turned back to Beat, who was nodding thoughtfully and tapping his drum sticks against his shoulder in slow rhythm. “Well? You in?” Shred prompted.

Beat tapped him on the head with the drum sticks. “You ever hear of a band with no drummer?”

“Well, that sounds like everyone’s in,” Wail observed. “Except we still need vocals. I’d volunteer, but I use my mouth to play another instrument already.  
  


“Ewww!” Diva giggled. “Did you have to make that sound so dirty?”

Wail chuckled. “Somebody’s got to keep things funny, and I have to say, I haven’t seen of you showing you’re up for it yet.”

And the five walked on into town, the night suddenly seeming much brighter.

XXX

**Thanks to DragonForce for the (awesome) song.**


	9. Alchemist House Call

Holding out his hand, the clump of blue grass was surrounded by a bubble and floated off the mat.

Sure that this was the right formula, he tapped a button on the handle of his weapon, and the other bubble full of green mushrooms moved. Both bubbles bumped together, then the two ingredients dropped into the bowl of the Gashacon Pestle.

It was a strange weapon, made of a spherical bowl with an opening on top. Around the rim of the opening were a circle of plastic-looking jewels, pink, blue, red, green and purple. When the ingredients dumped themselves inside the bowl, the jewels started to flash and hum in a mystical rhythm. Just a cheesy display from the toy it ultimately was, but a glass ball in the handle underneath filled up with a blue potion.

“Hope this works the way the notes said,” he murmured.

He meant it.

There wasn’t time to come up with anything else.

Carefully he rolled up the mat slipped into his backpack, then slid the Gashacon Pestle through a strap between glass bottles holding the other potion ingredients on the leather bandolier he was wearing. It matched well with the brown hooded tunic he had on. If it wasn’t for the giant green eyes looking out from underneath and the running shoes built into his armor, someone looking at him might never think he was a Kamen Rider.

Almost hidden by the faded brass belt buckle of a snaked biting its own tail was a green Rider Gashat. Its name said Taddle Chem, a hooded figure pouring two potions into a glowing bowl on the label.

He hurried down the stairs, holding up a round crystal full of tiny balls of light like fireflies, zipping around the inside in crazy spirals. They gave him a reassuring light against the grey brick walls that made up the tunnel around him, and seemed to close in slightly as he thought about how he might already be too late.

But a hard shake of his head banished those awful thoughts. He started taking the steps two at a time instead of one. The Corrupture couldn’t have gotten that far ahead, he told himself, Regardless, when he got to the bottom of the stairs, he decided now was the time to use one of the other potions he’d made. It had been a pain in the tail to find all the ingredients. He might never be able to make another one. If he saved it for later, someone might lose their life.

“You better be worth it,” he muttered, and pulled the Pestle back out of its strap again. He tapped a combination on the two buttons on the underside of the weird weapon’s bowl, AAB.

It got louder until the Pestle popped, and a plume of red smoke come out of the top. It arced downward to the floor but suddenly whipped around a corner.

With the tiny bit of extra speed his armor gave him, he followed behind as the smoke led the through branching tunnels and down ladders. Ahead the walls started to be marked with weird burned that confirmed his worst fears.

Still, after only another meet of running the smoke trail he’d been following burst and left a red stain on the floor. It had stopped in the middle of a doorway, and inside was what exactly is he’d been afraid of seeing.

“What do you want?!” demanded a handsome, blonde-haired young man wearing what, until a couple hours ago, had been an expensive white suit. Now it was tattered and stained with dirt. On one elbow was a frightening red stain. “Money? What, tell me! I can get you a fleet of sports cars, does that sound good? A vacation house in the Caribbean?”

The young man’s captor didn’t look like someone who was interested in any of those offerings. Instead of a thug or a kidnapper, he was some humanoid species covered in wrinkled purple skin. His eyes were shiny black marbles lodged in his face, and his scalp wrinkled and bald. The wriggling fingers sticking out of the sleeves of his ratty black robe ended with suction cups.

“You think the treasures of man are what Engstraum the Warlock desires?!” the monster roared, a horrible ragged echo to his voice. “My power brings me whatever I wish for! My power needs _blood_ to fuel it, and the blood of the arrogant provides the sweetest spark!”

The warlock’s captive winced and stumbled away from him as if he could actually escape, squeezing his eyes shut in fear. “You think _I’m_ arrogant?” he said, almost pleading by then. “You should see my father! Everyone who works for him hates him! All he cares about is his profits! He doesn’t let anybody else have something nicer than he does!”

Engstraum laughed and attached his fingers to the young prisoner’s face with a series of disgusting squelches. “ _Ooooh_! The power I should get from _his_ blood!” the warlock giggled as he started to drag through his fingers. “And the sweet irony that his son’s blood would help me get it… _bloody_ irony!”

Suddenly a blast of darts embedded themselves in the back of the warlock’s neck. He yelped in surprise, not pain, but still let go of the young man’s face. “Let him go,” said a voice from the doorway.

“And who demands it?” Engstraum growled.

The hooded figure stepped into the light, holding the Gashacon Pestle in his hand. “Kamen Rider Mortar,” he answered.

Red drops flowed out from between Engstraum’s fingers, the darts he’d been shot with already melting. He looked his attacker up and down, the hood hiding most of Kamen Rider Mortar’s mask, a strap of vials holding potions and powders across his chest. “What kind of stupid name is that?” the warlock snapped. “Aren’t supposed to have a cannon, or something?”

Behind him, even Engstraum’s prisoner whispered, “What a stupid name…what do you even do?”

Ignoring them both, the Rider repeated, “Let him go.”

But Engstraum ignored the demand, flicking the darts against the wall. They splattered and dripped down the bricks at high speed. It was more urgency than the Corrupture was showing toward the one who’d just shot him. “And what? Take you instead? You think I’m scared of what you’ve got in your hand there?” the warlock snorted in amusement. “I’ll show you how to scare someone!”

He held his arms out straight in front of him and a crimson flowed bulged out. It twisted in on itself and thickened. Until it divided in half and solidified into a lumpy-faced, four-armed troll and a bat with a long neck and the head of a dragon. Both had skin the color of blood, and behind Engstraum his prisoner whimpered pitifully at the sight of what his had created.

Letting out a laugh, the troll lunged for Kamen Rider Mortar and grabbed his arms with both pairs of hands. While he was pinned the dragon-bat flew in and spat a fireball at Mortar’s face. The Rider leaned suddenly and the flame burned away the side of his hood, as the flying monstrosity zoomed by and looped around to come at him again.

Just as the Rider managed to wriggle his wrist enough to get the little monster into the path of his Pestle.

Mortar slapped another combo into the buttons—BAB—and the bowl spat a white blob that splattered and covered the little horror’s face. It rocketed past Mortar’s shoulder, crashed into the troll’s shoulder cheek and the white goo covering its mouth stuck it there like glue.

“Hey!...Hey!” the troll grunted in annoyance. “Let go, driggy!” It gripped the dragon-bat and started to pull, the winged monster struggling to get free itself.

With the troll letting go of his arm in its confusion Mortar shoved his weapon into its wart-covered face and fired off another concoction. “Smile!” Mortar exclaimed. A cluster of yellow crystals split apart and gave a dazzling burst of light the troll’s wide subterranean eyes drank in like a sponge.

“Aaaaggh! You… _meanie_!” the troll wailed. He thrashed around with all his arms in confusion and Mortar managed to get his foot planted on the monster’s chest and pushed. He was hardly the strongest Kamen Rider in the world, but catching an opponent at just the right moment went a long way to making up for that. The troll stumbled away, toward Engstraum.

Hissing, the warlock faded into a cloud of red particles and his dazed henchmen stumbled right through him. The captive yelped and rolled desperately out of the way before the pair of monsters crashed into the wall, leaving a crater. Engstraum solidified again, shaking his head, muttering, “I bet you think that shows how clever you are.” Suddenly he held up a hand and fired a blast of red energy from the suction cup on his fingertip.

Mortar threw himself to the floor but Engstraum sprayed another finger, covering the Rider in a hard mound of sludge. “Guess not…clever enough,” Mortar groaned. He wriggled the arm holding his weapon, but it was pinned to his side. He tilted it straight up and drummed in a last code with his thumb. BBB. A blue blast shot out of the top of his Pestle but Engstraum saw it coming, easily leaning back and letting it go right past him to attach to the ceiling where it grew into a sheath of crystals.

“No,” the warlock said with a pleased smile on his flabby face. “Not nearly clever enough.”

“You’re right,” Mortar gasped, and Engstraum’s captive let out a sob of defeat. But Mortar chuckled, “You weren’t clever enough.”

Engstraum tensed, before he looked up at the crystals growing on the ceiling. Crystals that suddenly shattered and released a tornado of freezing wind right down on top of the Corrupture.

There was barely time for the evil sorcerer to scream out with surprise before he was frozen completely solid. Just as a white covering of frost formed over Engstraum, it covered the sludge sticking Kamen Rider Mortar to the floor. Flexing the little bit of super strength he had, Mortar shattered it and jumped to his feet.

Mortar plugged the Gashat from his belt into the Gashacon Pestle, making it change form. Its bowl tilted forward, and a long barrel extended out of the opening on top, turning it into a rifle. “ **Taddle Critical Philosophy!** ” cheered the game before Mortar squeezed the trigger on his weapon and shot a rain of color-changing powder all over Engstraum.

It covered Engstraum, turning his body dark grey like iron, then bright gold. Cracks raced across him body, and suddenly he shattered like glass. The pieces didn’t have a chance to touch the ground before they dissolved into purple goop and flowed away through the cracks between the bricks. His unconscious minions broke down and gushed away into the darkness just like Engstraum had. A bright yellow pair of words spun into existence overhead: GAME CLEAR. Around the Rider and the young man he’d saved, the bricks of the fantasy dungeon were dissolving away already.

A minute past before the rich boy spoke. “Is it really over?”

“That’s what the words just now meant,” Mortar replied patiently. “We’d better hurry out of here, though. I’m not sure I trust the entrance to still be there after the Game Area goes away again.”

His conversation partner nodded then bolted past Kamen Rider Mortar, obviously wanting nothing except to get back out. Mortar caught up to him and had to steer him back to the path out of the maze several times. When they got to the top of the highest staircase they found, there was a trapdoor that opened onto a modern city street. A black limousine, its paintjob perfectly clear and shining even in the encroaching darkness.

“If you’d care to step inside, sir,” Mortar said with a slight bow and indicating the rear door with his outstretched hand, “we’ll go home. Your parents must be terribly worried.”

A look of horror formed on the rich boy’s face, but faded into exhausted surprise. “Does that mean you’re…?!”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Mortar insisted. “I’ve had a very busy night, and my guild is raiding in half an hour.”


	10. He's Cruel. She's Sweet. They Fight Monsters.

“I never thought I’d see such a depraved thing in all my life,” he said with a guttural growl.

The pair of children on the bench behind wailed in despair, the lollipops they’d just been enjoying having suddenly disappeared. A young mother was trying to soothe her despondent daughter, who was crying over an empty cone that had held a delicious scoop of mint chip ice cream just a second before. A little boy cried at the suddenly empty bag of gummy monsters in his hand.

And near them, a very confused little girl put the change her uncle had given her for ice cream back in her pocket.

“What’s going on?” she asked up at him.

“I don’t know, but whatever it is,” he slammed his fist into his palm, “ _I’ll get to the bottom of it._ These poor children _will be avenged_.”

She took his hand and started to drag him away from the playground full of crying kids. He was eying the scene of misery so sharply he failed to notice until they went around a corner. “Tena, What are you doing?” he asked, noticing her tapping a name on her phone’s contact list.

As if he didn’t already know, she answered, “I’m calling Miss Sweet.”

The girl held the phone up to her ear as it rang, and he knew that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t seem to hear his loud groan. “I don’t need her help!” he protested. “Besides, I need to look into this as fast as possible! Who knows how far the sicko who did this is getting by now?”

Exactly like he was expecting, his niece ignored him. “She said she needs to know when you start getting all ‘grim avenger’. And I think she’s right,” the girl answered. Her face lit up. “Hi Miss Sweet! Yeah, something weird _did_ just happen!”

Grumbling, he folded his arms and looked away. His niece had gone silent, no doubt listening to “important” instructions _Miss Sweet_ was giving her. After another minute, she hung up and put her phone away.

“Did she tell you to tell me to smile more, again?” he grunted.

“Yes, Uncle Cruel,” the young girl grinned. He only scowled back, but that just seemed to amuse the child even more, her grin only widening. He sighed, leaned down and petted her hair.

Tena giggled.

“Look, you know better than to call me Uncle Cruel in front of anybody besides… _Miss Sweet_ , right?” he asked.

“Yes, Uncle Cruel!”

He nodded and stood back up. “Then I guess I just have to wait until _Miss Sweet_ gets here to…,” he groaned, “ _help_.”

Almost immediately he heard the roar of a motorcycle, and Tena made an excited “Squee!” Cruel sighed and covered his face with his hand.

Its owner came speeding into sight. The tires on her bike became recognizable as red and purple lollipops on different sides, their sticks the forks that attached them to the body of the motorcycle. Its headlight between the handlebars was a red and white peppermint. The vehicle left an exhaust trail that had green, yellow and red stripes in it, small bits of it forming into round candies that shattered on the street.

None of this was surprising, however, if they looked at Kamen Rider Sweet herself.

Her armor consisted of a white undersuit that made her impossible to miss even in broad daylight. Across her chest was a vest of silver armor showing a life bar like most Kamen Riders wore, the pair of icons underneath showing a silhouette of a slanted lollipop, the icon on the right showing one of a peppermint candy in a twist wrapper. Like the multicolored lollipops and candy drops patterned into the material of her undersuit. Shiny yellow plastic-like hair covered her head, swept back into a long immobile ponytail. The color contrasted sharply with the large green eyes peering out of her mask.

She wore a red pleated miniskirt made of the same plastic-like material as her hair under her Gamer Driver, red short puffy sleeves around her shoulders. Sticking out of the main slot in her driver was a Gashat with a label that could just been to read “Candy Climax”.

The Rider leaned her bike away from Cruel and his niece, skidding to a hard stop only a foot away from the pair. “You guys call for help?” she asked excitedly.

Tena walked up to her, so used to Cruel’s reaction that she walked right past him as he folded his arms and looked the other way. “Someone made all the kids’ candy disappear around here a while ago!” she reported to Kamen Rider Sweet.

Sweet clapped her hands to her cheeks and gasped over-dramatically. “That’s horrible! Sweet flavors are part of what makes childhood so fun!”

“Like we need you to tell us that,” Cruel muttered.

Not hearing him, or probably just ignoring him, Kamen Rider Sweet said, “Luckily, I think my little friends saw something that should show us who did this awful thing, and where they went.”

“You mean your little flying gumdrops?” Cruel whispered. Clearly hearing him that time, Sweet clapped him on the shoulder then squeezed it affectionately between her fingers.

“They’re not gumdrops, but yeah!” she exclaimed, then pointed up. “See?” Tena looked up and gasped.

“I see them!” the girl squealed, following the flightpaths of small peppermint candies, flapping the twists on their wrappers like butterfly wings. “That is so cool, Miss Sweet!”

One of the fluttering candies spun down and landed on Sweet’s hand. It hopped around, making strange chittering noises and flapping one wing, then the other as it communicated with its owner.

Sweet looked up at Tena and Cruel. “She says—”

“She says she saw a confection delivery van driving away from the area around the playground,” Cruel interrupted. “So let’s hurry before they have a chance to get away!” he said, and ran off.

Tena looked up at Kamen Rider Sweet. “Is that really what the candy said?” she asked.

Giggling behind her gloved hand, Sweet nodded. “Your uncle’s nicer than he pretends to be.”

“I know,” Tena giggled back. Sweet mussed her hair, and Tena giggled again.

XXX

Black Dragon Flavors.

That was what the faded wording said over the loading door of the rundown old building, almost hidden between taller, newer buildings. Parked outside was a shiny white delivery fan, with outlines of the same company name on the side, as if the lettering had been peeled off.

Inside the back of it were stacks of cardboard boxes. Slicing one open, Cruel growled as he found it stuffed with candy. Even loose scoops of ice cream that somehow hadn’t melted. Something beyond the norm was definitely going on. “I knew it,” he muttered. Stepping away from the van, he palmed a Rider Gashat from inside his leather jacket. “Ju Ju Donut” said the label, over an avalanche of different round confections.

“Wow, you’re even faster than before!” giggled Kamen Rider Sweet from behind him. “You even beat me here!”

Cruel glared at her, but he was pretty sure even if she wasn’t masked, she wouldn’t have a reaction to the look on his face.

Sweet walked past him and peered inside the back of the delivery fan. “So this is the place, huh? This must be somebody really weird…he can keep scoops of ice cream from melting??” she exclaimed.

He walked around the side of the van and started over to a window in the side of the bakery. Sweet zipped over to his side. “Oh, so we’re sneaking in, huh?” she whispered. “Cool…we’re gonna be like spies this time!”

“I don’t need help,” Cruel whispered back.

“Too bad, I’m already here,” Sweet whispered in reply. “I’ll go first, I’m quieter.”

Cruel grunted, but Sweet ignored him again and did a flawless somersault through the open window and rolled quietly to a stop inside the building. Looking over her shoulder, Sweet whispered, “Well? Come on!”

He pushed the window up with one hand and clambered through, moving slowly as he stepped on the floor to make as little noise as he could. “Why’d ask me to follow you, if you can handle this so easy by yourself?” Cruel grunted at her.

“I didn’t say I could,” Sweet answered. “You’re the powerhouse, remember? I bet we’ll need your strength after we find the Corrupture who stole all those sweets.”

“Where’s Tena?” he asked.

Sweet giggled. “I told her to go home where it was safe. She said yes and ran off.”

“You never had to actually take care of a kid, did you?” Cruel answered.

A dismissive wave of the hand was Sweet’s first answer. “She’s a smart girl, she knows not to follow us into a fight with Corrupture.” She stood up and opened the door leading out of the room.

Then she jumped back in surprise at what was on the other side.

Cruel guessed he didn’t blame her. It looked like a scene from a certain movie.

What the saw was a forest, made of candy. Trees that had candy drops as fruit, wrappers and all. Others had huge puffs of cotton candy instead of leaves, pink and light green and blue mixed in with the normal green leaves. Clouds that looked like huge clumps of cake frosting. A stream full of gold liquid, like butterscotch, flowed between them all. Running through the middle of the forest was a road made of brown bricks, like chocolate.

Even the sun peeking over the treetops looked like a giant lemon drop, lit up from within.

Clutching a hand to his mouth, Cruel said, “I feel like I’m getting cavities just looking at this place.”

“There’s a whole forest on the inside!” Kamen Rider Sweet squealed. “This is crazy!...Let’s go see where that road goes! You think maybe there’ll be a castle made out of chocolate on the other end?”

“And chocolate unicorns and chocolate rainbows over it?”

She giggled and grabbed his wrist. “Of course not! You ever hear of something as dumb as a brown rainbow?? They’ll be made of skittles!”

Cruel started following as she dragged him down the road. “I swear you’re five years old sometimes, Sweet,” he told her.

“My childlike innocence is my biggest asset!” she said before breaking out into a jog down the chocolate road. Her feet left impressions in the soft bricks, pieces breaking off and bouncing into the grass. It sure seemed like it really was made of chocolate.

Strange noises came out of the forest around them as Sweet ran and Cruel followed, her hand clamped to his wrist still. He thought for sure he saw pairs of glowing eyes in the forest, but they vanished into the darkness when he turned to look. The skin on the back of his neck stood up, just imagining what might jump out at them when they weren’t looking.

A place like _this_ couldn’t possibly look so sweet, and not hide something horrific.

Suddenly they stopped moving. Sweet was looking right into his eyes. “Hey…what are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Do we have time for this?”

Sweet shrugged. “You look like you have a lot on your mind right now, maybe? Tell me.”

He tried to glare, but it just wouldn’t come. Slowly, the words formed, then came out of his mouth. “I’m worried this is all some kind of trick. Like…,” he waved his arm at the candy forest around them, “…this whole situation is just a trick to make people let down their guard before it springs some kind of trap on them.”

Thoughtfully, she nodded. “Like Hansel and Gretel. But that’s okay! We already know the witch is coming!” Sweet pulled him down the chocolate road again, her grip even tighter than before with even more excitement. Just a few seconds and the candy forest started thinning out ahead. The wall of a castle stretched even higher than the treetops, the walls brown like gingerbread, with lines of frosting decorating the parapets. Marking the towers on the corners were white flags on tall silver poles, showing an emblem of a cake with strawberries on top.

“I bet whoever was stealing those sweets was taking it here!” Sweet declared at the top of her voice.

“All you’ll never get them back!” a snide voice yelled over the side of the wall. The two looked up and saw a knight standing there, wearing armor that looked like gingerbread too, frosting decorating his helmet and shoulders and a candy cane-striped spear in his hand. “Our fortress is invincible, and the queen is more powerful than anyone!”

Kamen Rider Sweet pointed a challenging finger up at the sentry. “She isn’t more powerful than _us_! We fight with the sweets of _justice_!”

The knight laughed. “Oh yeah! That doesn’t matter if you can’t even get inside our castle!” He stuck his thumbs in his ears and blew a raspberry down at them.

That was when Cruel’s thumb came down on the trigger button for his own Gashat. “ **Ju Ju Donut! See the variety! Chocolate! Rainbow! Cream-filled! Plain sugar! Time to make the _pain_!**” Sweet covered her mouth with both hands, giggling with anticipation.

“That can’t be good,” the sentry whispered.

Black energy crackled along the circuit panel on Ju Ju Donut. Cruel waved it slowly through the air as he lowered it into the first slot on the Gamer Driver around his waist. The device _roared_ as it accepted the game.

Dark waves of power spread out from the Driver and covered his body, leaving a black undersuit over most of it and a mask with menacing red eyes over his face. A vest of silver armor like Sweet’s formed over his chest, icons on the bottom showing a regular donut and another showing a donut with sprinkles.

Patterns of falling red donuts, covered in flames, formed on the outside of his arms and legs. Colorful sprinkles dropped onto Cruel’s head and stuck there. Donuts the size of hubcaps stacked four-deep on his forearms and shins. “Now I’ll show you _my_ power!” Cruel snarled, seeming not to notice how much less impressive his threat sounded coming from a man with huge donuts piled onto his arms.

And with his transformation complete, Kamen Rider Cruel turned to the doors of the gingerbread castle, reared back his arms and thrust them forward. The giant donuts attached to his forearms shot off and slammed into the doors, shaking pieces off the entire front wall of the candy castle, and retracted back onto Cruel’s arms. He thrust his arms out again and catapulted the donuts forward to batter the doors again. That time they crumbled into piles of candy junk.

“Got anything to say to _that_?!” Cruel yelled at the sentry, who was peeking out from behind the crenellations on the wall. He stood back up, but clutching his striped spear out in front of him with both hands now.

He called behind him, “Ser Chocolaut, seems there’s a challenger at the gates!” The sentry chuckled just before the ground shook for a second. A second of silence and again the ground shook. A giant shadowy form appeared in the large doorway, the ground shaking again as it moved closer. After that, it close enough to start recognizing it as another knight in gingerbread armor, standing almost eight feet high at the shoulder. A plume of pink frosting hang from the top of his helmet. In one huge hand he held a gingerbread mace with colorful gumdrop flanges. In the other huge hand was a much huger shield showing the castle’s emblem of strawberry shortcake.

Ser Chocolaut stopped in front of her Cruel and looked down at the Rider. “You called me out for _this_?” he asked the sentry, pointing at Cruel with his mace, then laughed. A few of the sprinkles on top of Cruel’s head were blown off by the force of the knight’s mocking laughter. “I bet it’ll only take one hit to crush him…you want to bet how many pieces he’ll break into this time?”

“I _will_ avenge the stolen candy. Every tear from one of those crying children is like an anvil tied to my soul,” Cruel growled. “I’ll crush _anyone_ who tries to stop me!”

Sweet rolled her eyes. The eyes in her mask.

“Avenging candy?! Even I think that sounds pathetic!” Ser Chocolaut said, turning his head up at the sentry. “You hear what he said?!”

The sentry said nothing, ducking behind the parapet instead.

And while Ser Chocolaut had his head turned, Kamen Rider Cruel threw himself forward, planted his hands on the ground and swung his feet out in front of him to launch the donuts around his shins. Giant confections catapulted off and hit Ser Chocolaut like a wrecking ball. The knight was knocked back through the castle door.

“Oh my,” the sentry said in quiet alarm.

With a grinding of confectionary armor, Ser Chocolaut got to his feet. “You got one hit for free,” he said.

“You won’t get any for anything,” Cruel snapped. The gingerbread knight raised his absurd mace to crush Kamen Rider Cruel, and as the weapon fell Cruel suddenly threw a punch. Again the donuts sprang off his arm and this time crashed into the top of the incoming mace, pushing it back over the knight’s shoulder. Ser Chocolaut squawked in surprise and didn’t notice when Cruel thrust his other fist and its stack of donuts shot off.

This time Ser Chocolaut raised his shield and the donuts collided against it, but the shield held. His mace swung out again and caught Kamen Rider Cruel on the side of the head with a terrible *CRUNCH*. Sweet squealed as her partner went down.

Overhead, the sentry chuckled. Sweet glared at him, but charged up to Ser Chocolaut as the knight lifted his candy-covered weapon to finish off Cruel. “Stop that, you big meanie!” she yelled at the top of her voice.

“Don’t worry, sweetie! You’re next!” Ser Chocolaut guffawed, not stopping. His vicious mace hit Cruel right between the shoulders, making the dark-clad Rider spasm and moan from the awful pain. Sweet quivered and covered her eyes at the horrible sight, but opened a pouch on the side of her belt and got out a chocolate drop that she flicked into the mouthplate of her mask.

At the same time Ser Chocolaut slammed his mace into Cruel’s back again, Sweet sprinted up to the gingerbread knight and slammed her mouthplate into the front of his helmet.

He yelped in surprise and started lifting his candy-covered mace again to attack her this time. Then he paused. The mace slipped out of his hand, and Ser Chocolaut fell to his knees with a crash. “What’d you…do to me?” he gasped, as if even breathing was a test of strength for him all of a sudden. Sweet giggled.

“I gave you a chocolate kiss!” Her mask winked, and a pink heart actually floated up. She pointed to the front of Ser Chocolaut’s helmet, which indeed had a chocolate-covered kiss mark on it. “It’s so sweet it melts anyone!...Now maybe it’s time for the cinnamon!”

A gong rang from the top of the castle wall. Ser Chocolaut looked up and fell onto all fours, looking hard at the ground in front of him. Figuring it probably wasn’t just her attack, Sweet looked over at the castle too. Standing on it was a woman in a flowing red dress, covered in round green jewels dusted with sugar. Her skin was chalk white, her eyes and lips pure black. On top of her head was a massive powdered wig made of pink cotton candy.

“Who are you?” Sweet asked mostly in disbelief of the sight.

“ _I_ am Queen Confectioniette the Second,” the lady snapped back at her. “And you will surrender immediately.”

Cruel had managed to get to his feet, shooting a glance at Sweet before he glared up at the queen and replied, “And why should we do that?”

Two sentries dragged a prisoner up to the edge of the wall.

Tena.

“Sorry Uncle Cruel…I wanted to help!” she called down.

Queen Confection clapped her hands for everyone’s attention. “You two will surrender right now, before I have this girl dipped in gingerbread and made into an ornament for my lawn,” she threatened.

Sighing in frustration, Cruel lifted his hands in surrender. Next to him, Sweet did the same.


	11. Cruel and Sweet: Now Complete

Hooking the handle of a candy cane-striped spear around his neck to stop him, the two gingerbread knights stopped Cruel in front of a door decorated in a crazed rainbow of candy attached to the front. The knob was a ball of caramel corn.

One of the knights held out a hand for Cruel. “Hand it over, Rider,” he demanded.

The thought of knocking them out and going to find Tena raced through Cruel’s mind, but the other knight was standing back and already had his hand on a rope of red licorice that disappeared up into a hole in the wall. Obviously, an alarm. Cruel could already tell if he tried anything, it’d only be seconds before the whole castle knew.

And Tena would probably be baked into a gingerbread man or something.

Instead, he took the Gashat out of his driver, then unfastened the belt and handed both to the knights. He didn’t bother to hide the scowl he gave both of them as he gave up his weapons.

“Wonder if you can keep that look on your face when you’re in there, tough guy,” the knight said, putting away Cruel’s Rider gear and getting out a key-shaped cookie. He stuck it into a lock in the middle of the golden goo that made the door and twisted, splitting the door down the middle as it swung open. “This is the sweetest place in the world, ya know.”

“I can tell from the people who live here,” Cruel grunted and walked into the cell and sat down in the middle of the floor. The door closed again with a dry crunch, and the two knights laughed at him for a minute before taking up guard positions outside Cruel’s cell.

XXX

Deep in the bowels of the candy castle, four more of the knights wheeled a cage with bars made of jagged rock candy behind Queen Confectionette. Inside it was Tena, Cruel’s niece. Her arms were folded and her mouth shaped into a defiant pout that none of her captors were cooperative enough to comment on.

A pair of huge doors made of extremely dark chocolate stood at the end of the hall. Two knights pushed them open, and Queen Confection stalked through into a huge treasure room.

At least, treasure to a little kid. Piles and piles of coins covered in gold foil. Stacks of colorful sugar crystals and dishes of ice cream as tall as people. Tapestries made of twizzlers. Pyramids of full gumball machines with glistening crystal domes and silver bases.

Queen Confection stepped inside and waved at the guards to secure the door behind her again. She took a seat in a throne that looked like it was covered in gold foil, the red cushion on it crinkling like a cellophane wrapper as she sat down on it.

Tena didn’t pay much attention to any of that, instead spotting the unmistakable colors of a Gamer Driver sitting on a pedestal near the middle of the room, underneath a glass dome. Weirdly, it looked like there should’ve been room for two of them in there…

“All of our spoils in one place, and freshly upgraded… Well, little human, what do you think?” Queen Confection asked with a smile so sweet Tena put a hand over her own mouth, afraid of getting cavities from it.

“I think it’s a lot of candy?” Tena replied, not sure what a supervillain expected her to say. It figured. She’d wanted to help Uncle Cruel on a real mission against real bad guys, and she couldn’t even figure out the right thing to say to them.

The queen grinned and Tena clapped her hands over her mouth again. “It is a lot of candy, little human! Lots of very _special_ candy! _This_ candy, it so happens, can turn the people who eat it into superbeings!”

Tena slowly lowered her hands back down to her sides, her eyes slowly going wide as she realized what she was hearing. “A superbeing? Like a Kamen Rider?” she asked.

“Oh no!” the queen laughed. “Much, much more! Practically immortal…and you, little human, you can have the honor of being the first of a new generation,” she went on with a purr. “I know your parents probably warned you about taking candy from strangers…but I’m offering you the chance to _evolve_.”

Slowly, Tena leaned back against the bars of her cage in thought, yelped as her back touched the rough facets of the bars and scooted forward to sit in the middle. Queen Confection smirked faintly at the display.

Nothing else happened. The queen stood there, silent and smiling pleasantly while she waited for an answer. Inside the cage, Tena pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them, chewing on her lip thoughtfully.

“Take some time to think it over, human,” the queen suggested with a reserved smile. “This isn’t a decision to rush into, I understand. Saying goodbye to the life you’ve always known, even with all the amazing things you’ll be able to do after you transform.”

After a few minutes being wheeled through the halls, the knights escorting Tena pushed her into a cell. One of them smashed the bars of her candy cage with his gingerbread sword that came within an inch of hitting her face. Tena thought he made a little chuckle that he didn’t manage to completely hide.

One of the other knights put a bowl of candy on a little table and said, “Here’s what Her Majesty promised. As soon as you’re ready to be one of us, just have one. Goodnight, human.” They closed the door, locked it loudly and through the door she could hear them taking up positions on the outside of the door.

Tena looked back at the bowl of candy they left her, Tena thinking about how if she ate that, and transformed, the guards probably weren’t going to worry about her trying to escape.

And that thought sent a chill up Tena’s spine.

XXX

A sound of the key grinding in the lock seized Cruel’s attention as he was looking around his cell for a way to escape. One of the knights pushed open the door and stepped inside, followed by another knight.

Who had a fire hose in his hands.

“Hey, Rider,” said the first knight.

“What the hell do you idiots want?” Cruel snarled.

Both guards laughed. “See, you’ve got a problem, Rider. That mouth of yours is only good for starting trouble,” the one with the hose said. “We’re gonna do you a favor and sweeten it for you.”

And then he turned on the hose, blasting Cruel to the back of the cell with a wash of liquid butterscotch.

“Are you really this pathetic?!” Cruel screamed, almost impossible to hear over the surging stream. “You think you can drown me with _candy_?!? All you’re doing is making me angry, and you _don’t_ want to get me all the way angry!”

Both guards just kept laughing at Cruel as he tried to push back against the hose’s discharge. Gritting his teeth, Cruel threw himself against the stream of butterscotch. It was oozing into his nose and he couldn’t see if the guards had reacted because his eyes were squeezed shut. But he kept forcing himself against the flow, trying to push through. It was like walking through mud, with the overpowering sweet smell in Cruel’s nose that was getting so strong it felt like it was about to knock him out.

He kept forcing his legs and shoulders forward, inch by inch. For a few seconds he dared to open his eyes and saw the guards weren’t laughing anymore. The one holding the hose was trying to twist the valve while keeping it aimed at Cruel at the same time, and his hands were shaking with fear. With all his strength Cruel managed to lunge forward and shoulder-check the guard, knocking the hose out of his hands. It snaked across the floor, painting the walls with butterscotch.

There was a crunch as the guard’s helmet connected with the wall and he went down, moaning and clutching his head. Cruel wiped the sugary goo out of his eyes and turned as he heard the other guard picking something up. A spear with a candy cane handle and a sharpened gumdrop tip.

Sneering, Cruel reached out and grabbed the spear’s handle.

“What do you think...” the startled knight asked as he tried to yank back on his weapon, but it was stuck to the blob of butterscotch coating Cruel’s hand. A hard pull and Cruel had yanked the spear away. “Give me back my weapon, human!” the dumbfounded knight demanded.

Cruel snapped the handle over his knee, then melodramatically threw the pieces behind him. “No weapon can save you…from the _rage_ I’m feeling right now!” Cruel shouted.

The surprised, and now disarmed knight took a few steps back in disbelief. “What…what are you _talking about_?!”

“Of course you don’t understand,” Cruel muttered. “ _No-one_ could _ever_ understand the _RAGE_ boiling inside me at so much injustice!”

Again the knight retreated a few steps from the ranting escaped prisoner. “Nobody said we had to watch a maniac!” he exclaimed, but turned his head just a fraction of an inch to look past Cruel’s shoulder.

Which didn’t go unnoticed. Cruel threw a punch backward and his gooey fist smacked into the faceplate of the other guard sneaking up behind him. His head recoiled from the force of Cruel’s punch, but then snapped back, stuck to him by a strand of melted candy. The knight’s face was pulled into Cruel’s fist again and that time he went limp.

Taking a last confused look at Cruel and his unconscious partner, the disarmed knight suddenly lunged for a rack of torture devices. Grabbing a licorice whip, he chuckled as he cracked it in front of Cruel. “What kind of rage you think you’ll feel after a couple hits from this baby?”

With a shake of his fist, Cruel let the unconscious knight behind him slide to the floor. He pointed a finger and replied, “I’ll come over there and let you see for yourself, what kind of rage…” Not sounding aware at all of how ridiculous he sounded with blobs of melted candy dripping off all over him.

Then he charged, taking loud sticky steps down the hall.

XXX

“Hey! Hey, is anybody there??” Tena yelled. Again there was no answer. At least for a minute, until she heard footsteps coming down the dungeon hallway that time. One of the gingerbread knights came up to the candy blob door and stared through at her.

Small purple crystals had sprouted all over her skin, covering her arms and face in little purple sparkles. “That candy from the queen was amazing! I feel so…strong, I guess?” Tena said, sounding a little uncertain. She quickly added, “I think I’m getting smarter too! This feels so cool!”

“Heh, couldn’t help yourself, could you?” the knight chuckled. He unlocked the door and pulled it open. “Let’s go see the queen, I bet you and she’ll have a lot to say to you now.”

“Ha…yeah,” Tena replied. They went up a spiral staircase back into the main castle and through the halls back to the treasure room where they’d taken Tena before. Seeing her being led up to the doors by a guard, the ones keeping watch outside the treasure room pushed the doors open.

Sitting on the throne in the middle of the room was Queen Confectionette. Over her head was a thick purple cloud, spinning over and over as she waved a gold foil scepter covered in candy jewels. When she saw Tena being escorted back in the queen’s face positively _erupted_ into her deadly-looking grin. It was all Tena could do not to clap both hands over her mouth again.

“You’ve decided to accept the power… _marvelous_!!” the queen exclaimed. “The change is happening already! You’ll make a fine emissary, I’m sure!”

Tena stepped forward slowly, nodding along with the queen’s words. “It feels kind of funny, but…like, _good_ funny?” she answered, looking a little dazed.

The queen waved her scepter and the purple cloud that’d been dancing over her shattered into purple streams that drifted down into piles of candy all over the room. They glowed for a second as Queen Confectionette rose from her throne and walked closer to inspect Tena’s transformation. “That’s to be expected when evolving into a higher life form,” she offered.

Tena took a few cautious steps over to one of the piles of candy treasure. “Is that what you did to the candy you gave me? Put that purple stuff into it?” she asked. “Is that stuff the Corrupture virus…?”

Nodding slowly as if she appreciating how observant Tena was, the queen answered, “I see you’re both well-informed, but more openminded than most humans. Yes, that is the Corrupture virus, the key to power and immortality. Just because it’s a _virus_ , humans reject all it could offer them.”

“Well, you gotta admit it doesn’t have the best image,” Tena responded. “Before some guys almost used it to take over the world, or something…”

The queen turned up her nose. “Hmmmph! Typical human nihilism is what was behind everything that happened to do with the Bugster virus, little one. Without the likes of Kuroto and Masamune Dan perverting it to their own idiotic goals, the virus can evolve! And the world can evolve along with it!”

Walking over to another pile of candied jewels, and then to one of coins of gold foil, Tena nodded thoughtfully. “Do the different kinds turn people into different Corrupture?”

“Hardly,” the queen replied. “They are simple carriers.”

Nodding again, Tena continued a slow circuit around the room. “Too bad. I kinda wanted to make like a team with my friends, you know?”

She noticed the queen had stopped following her. And the look on the queen’s face had turned icy. Confectionette was glaring at a little trail of purple crystals on the floor behind Tena. “You seem to be losing something, my dear,” she said as a few more pieces of rock candy came loose from the girl’s skin.

“Heh, well…guess you’re the queen for a reason,” Tena chuckled weakly, even more bits of the candy she’d stuck to her arms dangling and falling off.

Before she grabbed the Gamer Driver she saw in her first visit to the treasure room and ran for the door.

“STOP HER!” Queen Confectionette screamed, her knights rushing forward to obey, their armor clacking together as they ran. Right as they were about to crash into each other Tena threw herself forward and slid between the legs of one of the surprised guards. As soon as she was past the girl went off running through the doors and down the hall.

Back to the dungeons, where she was sure she could already hear fighting.

XXX

Again the knight cracked his licorice whip.

Again the weapon hit Cruel full in the chest but he just kept coming. The only result the guard got was an angered frown from Cruel, who suddenly threw himself at the guard fists-first. All the guard could see was sugared stars for a few seconds, and then the next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, disarmed. Cruel was leaning over him, teeth clenched in a fierce growl.

“Imsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorrypleasestophittingmesir!” the guard pleaded.

Cruel yanked him up by his shoulder. “You think saying sorry’s enough for all the things you people did?! All the tears the innocents shed thanks to you and your soulless pals?!?” Cruel demanded.

“…is it at least a start?” the terrified guard whispered back.

His answer was a punch to the chest that sent bits of gingerbread armor bouncing off the dungeon walls. “Do you think evil can be forgiven just like that??” he roared. “Tell me where you took my Driver, and we’ll see after that!”

“But probably not, right?” the guard asked.

“But probably not, right,” Cruel confirmed.

The guard grunted and tried to squirm out of his attacker’s grip, but Cruel slammed him against the wall, the tip of his elbow pinned against the guard’s throat. “That’s the last one you get for free!” Cruel growled. “Now, tell me where you took my weapons, or you won’t have a chance to regret it!”

“I got ‘em right here, Uncle Cruel.”

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Tena’s familiar face, but with pieces of rock candy stuck to her cheeks and forearms for some reason. Held out in her hands was a Gamer Driver that was the unmistakable black case and pink lever that his was. Cruel’s eyes darted from that back up to his prisoner, and back to Tena.

“…thanks, Tena,” he said, a little sheepishly.

The guard waved his hand for attention. “May I be excused?” he asked.

“Sure,” Cruel replied, dropping him to his feet. Then threw a karate chop to the back of the neck that knocked the guard out cold. He looked down at a smirking Tena for a few seconds, then asked, “Where’d you get that?”

She giggled. “I got it with my genius plan!” she exclaimed, then held out the Driver for him to take. Cruel snatched it away and Tena’s smile turned cheeky, but he ignored it as he locked his Driver around his waist again. She added, “It looked like the little bubble they were under had enough room for two of those belts, though.”

Cruel looked over at her. “So you’re saying you think Sweet already got in there and stole her Driver back?” He looked away and shook his head, sighing. “Yeah, I bet she did. Hey, kid? Obviously you’re not gonna listen to me if I tell you to hide someplace safe, and that’s how we got into this in the first place. So let’s go back to where you found my belt, and I bet Sweet’ll show up.”

“Okay, Uncle Cruel!” Tena beamed, but he waved his hand back and forth in front of her face.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” he warned, “so don’t get any ideas about helping fight, got it?” Tena nodded, and Cruel sighed. “All right then. Let’s go. I’ll show those candy freaks my unbridled rage!”

XXX

As soon as they saw who was coming, the two guards standing at the door to the queen’s treasure room turned and ran down the hall as fast as their candy-coated feet would take them. A column of giant flying donuts hit one in the back and he went down with a cry. The other guard froze in surprise at seeing his partner go down, leaving him vulnerable for the second column of donuts to knock his legs out from under him. The surprised guard squawked and hit his head on the floor, then went still with a last groan.

“These guys are even weaker than they look,” Cruel muttered. A shadow fell across him, and Cruel turned slowly to see the form of Ser Chocolaut looming above him.

“You’re still looking for a fight, I see,” the knight grunted. “Try me, _human_.”

Cruel threw a punch that stopped an inch in front of the oversized knight’s face. “You’ll wish you hadn’t said that after you feel my unbridled rage!” he declared.

“…you just did that one, Uncle Cruel,” Tena whispered. “You’re reusing your stuff already.”

Ser Chocolaut quirked his head sideways in confusion, then hissed in anger at letting the humans distract him with their banter. From out of the darkness of his cape he whisked a halberd that he _SLASHED_ so hard it made a sound like a thunderclap and filled Cruel’s nose with the minty fresh scent of its blade as it came within a few centimeters of his face.

Cruel ran behind a column to try and get a second’s freedom to come up with a plan. There was another crack and he fell flat on the floor before the column was sliced in two and Cruel was almost bisected at the waist. The Rider got to his feet and went into an awkward sprint across the hallway to find another place where he could get a few seconds of breathing room. The overpowering smell of mint was the only warning he got to throw himself forward before Ser Chocolaut’s halberd buried itself three feet deep into the floor.

“You can’t escape for long, human!” Ser Chocolaut chuckled evilly, yanking his weapon out with ease.

But Kamen Rider Cruel gave a chuckle of his own. “That’s what you think, freak,” he muttered. The knight’s giant weapon came out in an arc, aimed at his neck, but Cruel did a high kick and a donut on his foot came off, bouncing off the wall and rolling back past him. Cruel made a powerful jump and Ser Chocolaut’s halberd shaved an inch off his boot’s heel but Cruel landed on the rolling donut. He zipped past Chocolaut, pedaling his feet to stay on top of his new mode of transport.

“What…what?! Hold still!” Ser Chocolaut sputtered, turning to try to keep facing Cruel while the Rider rolled around him in a circle, looking absolutely ridiculous running in place on top of a rolling donut. In spite of his protest Ser Chocolaut hefted his weapon and swung it out to meet Cruel’s midriff.

Only for the Rider to turn and punch Chocolaut right in the face. The donuts coiled around his arm detached and pushed the knight out of range. By the face.

“The only thing you freaks think matters is power,” Cruel shook his head. “You have no idea how much more a heart burning with fury can achieve.”

“You’re sounding a little too optimistic with that one, Uncle Cruel,” Tena advised him

Shaking his head again, Cruel started his finisher. “ **Ju Ju Critical Cruelty!** ” He spun in place and the donuts around his arms and legs came flying off and pinned Ser Chocolaut’s own arms and legs to the floor.

“What in the name of strawberry torte—” the astounded knight had time to say before Kamen Rider Cruel jumped up high enough for his shoulders to dent the ceiling and come down spinning like a drill and trailing donut sprinkles.

Just before impact Cruel whispered, “Feel the pressure of an enflamed heart!” A spectacular purple blast erupted around them. It cleared showing Kamen Rider Cruel in a crouch, his giant eyes focused on the door to the treasure he’d been trying to enter when they were attacked.

“Let’s put an end to the suffering.”

XXX

With that battle finally taken care of, the dual donut columns retracted to around Kamen Rider Cruel’s arms. “Let’s crack this case open,” he said as he turned and faced the door to the treasure room.

Tena covered her mouth to stifle a giggle at the silly remark.

Suddenly the doors rocked on their hinges, and the guards on the inside of the treasure room yelled in surprise. Sitting on her throne, Queen Confectionette scowled, knowing exactly what was coming.

One more time the doors shook before they shattered into a thousand shards of watermelon-flavored candy. Kamen Rider Cruel jumped in through the empty doorway and pointed a finger at the queen. “Vengeance has caught up with you, Corrupture!”

Confectionette snorted and gave a haughty laugh. “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard!”

“And how long have you been around to hear _anything_?!” Cruel countered. “You’ve wronged too many innocent children to count! Now it’s time to _pay_!”

“I plan to!” the queen laughed even louder than before. “We’ll return all that candy, now that it’s been treated to be even sweeter!” A vicious gleam erupted in her eyes, and Cruel didn’t have to guess what she was talking about. How many children would be turned into Corrupture if she was allowed to do that?

Kamen Rider Cruel had no intention of letting her. Of course.

“Guards, seize them,” the queen commanded. The two gingerbread knights exchanged a worried glance, but fire literally erupted over their ruler’s eyes and they leveled their spears at Cruel in resignation.

He whirled around and the guards stopped in their tracks again. “Taste my fury,” Cruel warned them. Then jumped with one foot on each of their spears before he vaulted into the air, somersaulted twice and shoved out his legs in their direction.

The last thing either of the guars saw before losing consciousness was the donuts springing off his feet and straight into their faces.

A disgusted sigh. Queen Confectionette facepalmed and raised herself off her throne, twirling her gold foil scepter a few times. Suddenly rows of colorful gumballs popped out of the bottom of her shoes and the queen came at Kamen Rider Cruel like a blur. She smashed into him and sped away, knocking the Rider across the room and scattering one of the giant piles of candy all over the floor.

“What the hell was that?” the dazed Cruel asked as he pried himself out of the impression he left in the wall.

His reply was the queen’s evil, cackling laugh. “You’ve never heard of a gumball rally?” she taunted the Rider. She blurred across the room and plowed into Cruel again, but having been hit once, he was a little more ready and planted his feet just before impact. The donuts on his feet stretched out like springs, absorbing most of his attacker’s momentum. Cruel held out his arms and the donuts over them pressed down as he hit the ceiling then sprang back sending him flying back down at an angle, delivering an awesome jump kick that smashed the queen into the floor.

And immediately she sat up and blasted him off with a spray of cotton candy from the jewel on her scepter. “Oh no!” Tena screamed in dismay as her uncle was glued to the ceiling by a sugary cocoon. Cruel himself wrestled and pulled at thick tendrils of cotton candy but even his strength appeared to be no match for the sticky web covering him.

So it when Tena saw the new development in the battle first, she gasped with relief.

A compartment was kicked out of the side of the wall and out of it somersaulted Kamen Rider Sweet in full armor. “Hi everybody! Sure is loud on this side! You must be having a really wild party!” she said, and winked, a little heart floating up from her eye.

“Miss Sweet! You came!” Tena exclaimed and slumped against the wall.

“I was looking for you!” Sweet giggled. “They put me all the way on the other side of the castle. I had to check the whole castle after I stole back my Driver!”

The queen whirled her scepter. “Then both of you can die together!” she shrieked, “And watch while I turn that girl into the first new Corrupture of our kingdom for real!”

Tena squeaked and hid behind Kamen Rider Sweet, who gave her a protective pat on the head. “Don’t worry sweetie, nobody’s gonna hurt you while we’re here,” Sweet said, gesturing up to where a growling Cruel was hanging. “We should probably get your uncle down before we try anything big, though.”

Atop the queen’s scepter the jewel flashed and another storm of cotton candy flew out. “You can see how well how it worked for _him_!” Confectionette screamed. Sweet didn’t even move to avoid the attack, instead sticking a hand into a pouch on her belt and popping a candy ball from it into her mouth. She blew a kiss and jet of fire shot out of her mouthplate.

A scream of surprise and horror came from the queen’s lips as she dodged out of the way to keep from being immolated. The back of her towering hairdo started to burn anyway but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead the scowl on her face twisted into a mask of pure _rage_. “Fine, human! Let’s see find out right now whose powers are stronger!” She tweaked one of the jewels and the purple glow from her jewel turned white. A column of white lifesaver rings shot out from it at Sweet.

The Rider winked again and blew a kiss. A fiery lip-mark as tall as she was came from her mouthplate. Fire met ice causing a terrific blast of steam that forced everyone back a few steps and put out Queen Confectionette’s hair.

“Felt that? That was nothing compared to my ultimate attack!” the queen declared. Sweet’s hand darted for the bag on her waist but the queen was even faster. In the same movement the queen turned another candy gem on the base of her scepter and fired a blast that solidified around Sweet’s hand into the head of a gummy bear, trapping the Rider’s hand inside her candy bag. “Now to finish you off and next, your little friend!”

Sweet yanked uselessly, trying to free her hand so she could fight back. “Don’t you want to make us watch as you turn your victim into a monster??” she asked frantically.

“Hey!” Tena protested.

“I’m trying to stall her!” Sweet whispered back.

“Oh…okay.”

Confectionette laughed mockingly. “Or I could kill the two of you and make _her_ watch, so she knows for sure becoming part of the Corrupture is her only choice.” She lifted her scepter high and charged an attack with the jewel lighting up.

And suddenly two stacks of donuts came down and pinned her arms together.

The queen let out a yell of surprise before Kamen Rider Cruel dropped from the ceiling in front of her and launched the donuts around his arms off. Both piles of giant pastries plowed into the Corrupture monarch and knocked her across the room until she crashed into the far wall.

Tena’s face lit up with a smile and she ran to his side and threw her arms around his waist. “Uncle Cruel! How did you get out?!” Tena yipped excitedly.

Patting her head softly, he answered, “When your friend here and the queen made that big explosion it ripped part of the cocoon and I ripped out the rest.”

With a coy grin on her face the little girl said, “You used your unbridled rage, right?” Cruel started to say something, but stopped when he realized Sweet was giggling behind her hand. Seeing him speechless they just giggled together.

But across the room Queen Confectionette screamed in anger and red light flowed from the jewel atop her scepter down over her arms. Cracks were forming in the donuts over her arms from drying out until they shattered completely. Her regal face was a mask of rage as she leveled her scepter and its bright red glow started building up again.

“Now! We have to finish it now!” Cruel declared.

“With your unbridled rage,” Tena snickered. Sweet giggled too but letting out a sigh, Cruel crushed the gummy bear head around her head. Next he struck a pose holding up his arms next to his face. Sweet pulled a red gumball decorated with black dots out of her bag.

Their Drivers announced in synch, “ **Combined Critical! Sugar Rush Twice!** ” Queen Confectionette fired a giant blazing gumball at the pair of Riders, who launched their own attack. Sweet flicked the gumball onto the ground with her thumb and blew a kiss at it. The glistening lip mark touched the candy and it sprang up the size of a horse. With that achieved Cruel thrust out his arms and the donuts around them came off and pushed Sweet’s gumball across the room like springs.

Giant gumballs collided. The Kamen Riders’ smashed the queen’s to bits and rolled right over the queen herself. Her eyes went wide just before it flattened her into the floor.

A message appeared near the ceiling: GAME CLEAR. They had no time to notice that with how pieces of the ceiling were starting to shake off. “She was one of those ‘load-bearing bosses’,” Cruel observed. “Figures. Let’s run for it!”

“With our unbridled rage!” Tena chuckled.

XXX

On a hilltop at a safe distance, the Kamen Riders and Tena watched the gingerbread castle finish shaking itself to pieces. Even a few of the frosting clouds in the sky titled and fell into the cloud of brown dust marking the final passing of Queen Confectionette and her insidious, sugary forces. Cruel shook his head and sighed at the sight. “We failed,” he muttered. “All those stolen treats…gone forever.”

“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Sweet said and patted him on the shoulder. “There’s plenty of sweets in the world already. Today might save the kids back in town a few fillings.”

He looked over at her, a quirked eyebrow raising above the oversized eye on his mask. “That sounds hypocritical, coming from you, you know,” Cruel pointed out.

She shrugged and giggled. “There are other things for kids to be happy about than candy…speaking of, why are you always trying to sound so angry?”

“Why am I always trying to ‘sound’ angry?”

Tena spoke up: “Branding.”

Sweet tilted her head incredulously at the girl. “Branding??”

With a coy smile and a glance over her shoulder at her uncle, Tena answered, “He’s trying to create a character so he can get a following. He thinks a broody hero would be good to get a lot of fans so he can get famous.”

A moment of silence passed as Kamen Rider Sweet looked over at Cruel in disbelief. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “It’ll never work!” she said in between bursts of giggling. “You’re too sweet for that kind of persona!”

“I thought _you_ were Sweet,” Cruel countered.

“Come on, you two!” Sweet said and waved for them to follow her back down the path to the edge of the Game Area. “I’ll treat you to some ice cream, how’s that sound?”

Following her down the hill, Cruel turned toward his niece. “You think it’s a good persona for me, right?” he asked.

“Not really, Uncle Cruel.”

“…dang,” was all Cruel managed to say. He had some thinking to do about his image.

But thinking over ice cream wasn’t a bad way to do it.

XXX

**And there’s a story about two of the sillier side Riders I dreamed up for _Utsura_.**

**Cruel’s name comes from “cruller”, a kind of donut. Sort of. It played well with the name I picked for the candy-themed Rider who was his opposite personality-wise. Then again, maybe their personalities aren’t really so different after all.**

**By the way, Kamen Rider Sweet gets her power from a game called Candy Climax. I imagined it as one of those “falling object” puzzle games like Columns, Cleopatra Fortune, or most accurately, Yoshi’s Cookie. Some of her attacks are based on special effects the player can use in the game, like cinnamon candies burning obstacles in the way of making matches.**

**Hope it was a fun read! Look forward to the next sidequest too!**


	12. And Break

“And…break!”

“I don’t need you to tell me to break. I’m already the best at this game,” he said, waving a hand past the cartridge locked into the Gamer Driver around his waist. “And I ain’t gonna shoot til you shut up. You wanna be here all night?”

Fats Porker obliged by leaning on his pool cue and falling silent. His opponent knew better than to think it was out of respect as a rival. Let alone respect for the game. The grotesque Corrupture didn’t want to put him on his guard so early in the game.

Kamen Rider Hustler was sure of that.

Still, it was time to start the game and show this Corrupture just what a mistake he’d made. The Rider tweaked his suit’s plastic-looking fedora straight, contrasting well with the faked half-finished cigarette melded to the front of his mouth plate. He bent over the table, aiming the stick with his right hand with the index finger arched over the tip. Left wasn’t his dominant hand, but he couldn’t keep the right arm steady enough anymore to make the shots he needed to be a champion pool player.

It didn’t matter, though. Because he’d learned to be a champion pool player with his other arm.

His opponent chuckled. “You’re gonna shoot at an angle to break?”

Hustler didn’t answer. The game would speak for him. It was a language all its own. He hit the ball. It banked off the side in a V-shaped arc and sent the other balls bouncing all over the table. The 9, 10 and 11 balls disappeared into three different pockets at the same time.

Fats laughed and ended it with a snort. He wriggled his drooping pig ears and sniffed the ears with his wide porcine nose. At least he didn’t _smell_ like a pig too, Hustler thought with some small gratitude. “Looks like you’re playing stripes, huh?” the obese Corrupture giggled.

With a nod, Hustler answered, “And looks like it’s your shot now.”

The Corrupture got up and walked over, his belly bouncing around under his straining button-up vest and shirt. Horrible brown drool trickled down from flabby jowls holding rows of uneven yellow teeth and tall fangs. The table sagged a little when he leaned his weight on it, lining up his cue to take a shot of his own.

“Watch _this_ fancy shooting, human!” he snickered. Carefully aiming his stick, Fats knocked the cue ball bouncing off the edges of the table in an upside down V arc wider than Hustler’s shot. Balls clattered all over the table and the 2 and 5 balls disappeared down the top left and bottom right corner pockets.

Hustler chortled. “Not bad.”

He was expecting Fats to fly into a squealing, saliva-spewing rage at his genius going unrecognized. Instead Fats gave a snorting, sniggering laughing that sent his ears shaking and awful brown slobber spraying down and staining the table where they landed. So he was part-right, anyway. “I been waiting for a smartass like you to play, who can actually _play_ ,” the pig sneered.

“Any clown can say he’s amazing,” Hustler shrugged. “It takes talent, it takes dedication to be the best.”

Fats snorted in amusement. “And you’re the best, I guess.”

The Rider shrugged again. “ _I_ guess we’ll find out if we stop talking and start playing.”

His opponent held out his hand across the pool table. “Lead on, MacDuff. It’s your shot.”

XXX

Eyes seemed to be watching the game from the smoke-filled darkness around them as the game ticked by. When Hustler tried to look back, he wasn’t surprised to see nothing there.

Fats noticed him looking and chuckled. “Afraid I think I can’t beat you fair, and I’ll have somebody jump out and stick a knife in your back?” he slobbered.

Hustler shrugged. “You’ve got to admit there’s a lot of history for that kind of thing.”

Suddenly the Corrupture’s face erupted into a silent snarl of rage. “You still think that was me, when we were kids,” he squealed. Fats gripped the pool cue like a staff and stomped closer on a cloven hoof.

“Because Bugsters and Corrupture aren’t known for fighting fair,” Hustler replied calmly.

A weird purple glow came over the pig monster’s eyes. “Are we responsible for what happened when a few opportunistic humans tried to pull the strings?” he asked with unusual eloquence, then it was gone again, his eyes the small beady things they’d been before. Fats Porker snorted in annoyance and turned back to the pool table.

He shot. It carried the cue ball around the table, knocking the 3 ball down a side pocket and knocked a ball Hustler had been planning to sink on his turn out of the way. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t push you off the edge back then,” he grunted. “Bet you think if your arm hadn’t got messed up from that you’d’ve already won this game.”

Kamen Rider Hustler gave his opponent a sideways look and stepped up to the table for his own shot. “Glad to have you around to tell me what I think so I don’t need to worry about doing that for myself,” he replied. “And matter of fact, I don’t think you’re the one who pushed me, Poke.”

He shot, ignoring the squeal of anger he heard from over his shoulder. The 12 and 13 balls bounced off the cue ball and off at angles in a Y shape. In the blink of an eye they disappeared down the pockets at two opposite corners.

The next thing he knew Kamen Rider Hustler wasn’t looking down at the table anymore. He’d been yanked around to stare right into Fats Porker’s deformed face, a puff of steam blowing up that fogged the lenses of Hustler’s mask. “ _Don’t. Call. Me. That. Again_ ,” warned the Corrupture.

His head jerked upward when the tip of Kamen Rider Hustler’s cue slammed into his flabby chin. The Rider stepped back and calmly leaned against the pool table. “Then tell your boss not to send somebody I know to try and knock me off my game,” Hustler answered. “He wants to try to get inside my head, only fair for me to do it back.” He crossed his arms in front of him and he puffed a plume of smoke from the cigarette stub in his mask. “So you gonna play, or you just wanna fight?”

Huge wrinkled belly heaving grotesquely, Fats Porker stepped back up to the table and lined up his next shot. He knocked the 6 ball spinning across the table, knocking aside another two balls Hustler had been hoping to sink with his next shot. The 6 ball disappeared into the darkness of a side pocket, and Fats Porker whipped around as menacingly as he could with his huge, bulky body.

Looking back over the sweat-stained shoulder of his shirt, Fats Porker snorted. “I can beat you _either_ way, human.”

Silently, Kamen Rider Hustler nodded. “Then let’s play the game, Poke.”

With an annoyed snort and wrinkling his nose, Fats stepped away from the table and extended his hand, silently telling the Rider to take his shot. Keeping one eye on the deformed shadow his friend had become, Hustler lifted his cue and took aim.

XXX

It seemed cliché, but he supposed he knew it would come down to this.

The glistening black 8 ball was the last one on the table.

And it was Fats Porker’s shot.

He stomped up to the table, laying his cue up on the edge and bumped the bottom into Hustler’s stomach as he lined up his next shot. “Whoops,” Fats snorted. “Guess I’m too caught up in the game.”

“That’s nothing new, is it,” Hustler muttered.

Suddenly Fats whirled around and caught Hustler in the side of the head with the stick. “Are you looking for a fight?!” squealed the pig Corrupture. “You that afraid I’m gonna win that you gotta change the game??”

Hustler staggered away, still dazed from the blow upside the head. “You _do_ think I pushed you! You still got a grudge with me over your messed-up arm!” Fats thundered and squealed at the same time, making his words come out sounding even more disturbing.

The Kamen Rider had managed to compose himself by then and jabbed Fats in the stomach with the tip of his own cue to push him back to a safer distance. He retorted, “It’s the truth. You always did get too caught up in the game. No, you didn’t push me down that time, but you still got too caught up in games.”

Squealing furiously Fats raised his cue like a staff and swung it down at Hustler’s head. He deftly lifted his own to block it and planted his foot on his attacker’s belly and shoved him away. “Don’t try to deny it, Poke,” Hustler said quietly. “It’s why you played Kamen Rider Chronicle when everyone tried to warn you it was dangerous. It’s why you’re working for the monsters now. I’m gonna get you out, though. I promise.”

Fats was silent for a minute. Then another minute. Yet another minute. He spun around and for a fraction of a second Hustler got ready to defend himself from another attack. Instead, Fats was leaning over the table and hit the cue ball at the last ball waiting to be sunk.

The 8 ball bounced off the edge of the table at a lazy angle, crawled rather than rolled up to another edge and banked sleepily to a stop in the middle of the table.

“Your shot, human,” Fats grunted and stepped aside.

Before the Corrupture had a chance to change his mind Hustler stepped up and took aim. He hit the cue ball hard enough to leave a blue chalk stain on the side when it went bouncing off one side of the table then hit the other and snaked over to where the last ball on the table was sitting. It was a sloppy, chaotic shot. Hustler knew he could’ve done much, much better.

But he also wanted more than anything to finish the game before he was forced to fight his old friend.

White hit black. Rolling with malicious slowness, the 8 ball bounced off the back rim off the table and to the side pocket. Hustler expected it to stop and hang halfway over the rim. Instead it fell right in and clattered its way to the groove in the side of the table.

“ **GAME CLEAR** ,” announced the bodiless voice that always announced a Kamen Rider’s victory. Around the two of them the darkened pool hall started peeling away pixel by pixel.

Fats stomped up to Kamen Rider Hustler, his eyes no longer his own. Instead they were glowing a forbidding shade of dark purple. The voice he spoke in then wasn’t his own. It was someone else’s, someone Hustler didn’t recognize, and it seemed to echo with a hundred other voices softly saying the same words in unison.

“You think you’re clever, don’t you human?” Fats questioned. “I bet you think you won because you convinced your old friend you can save him…but I saw everything that happened. The two of you are _nothing_ compared to my power.”

Hustler asked, “So…not up for a game of darts instead?”

Fats Porker’s obese body was breaking down and drifting away like the pool hall around them. While he disintegrated he said, “I’m not impressed by your little jokes, human. Soon my kind will be in charge of the world, just like I’m already in charge of your old friend here. But you…I’m going to remember you, and next time we meet, I’ll destroy you, Rider. Hourakou Byougen always repays a debt.”

Then the pool hall and Fats Porker were both gone, and Kamen Rider Hustler was all alone in the empty lot where they’d met for their challenge.

He slapped the tip of his cue against his other hand. “I’ll be waiting for that day, Byougen,” Hustler whispered. “I’ll be waiting.”

XXX

**Merry Christmas, or whatever you celebrate, everybody!**


	13. Parental Discretion Advised

Another familiar hiss of the weapon firing.

Another screech of an incoming projectile that reminded Kamen Rider Caliber of the bottle rockets he used to shoot with his dad when he was a kid.

Except, of course, this one would kill him.

So he ran for all he was worth in his heavy armor, his shotgun bouncing around from the strap around his arm. From behind him there was the deafening sound of the rocket exploding that he’d been expecting. Following it was another sound like a thousand toothpicks splintering. It was the crate he’d been hiding behind shattering in the blaze of the missile that’d hit it, showering Caliber with wooden slivers.

While the flash from the explosion was still bright Caliber dove and rolled behind a long metal shipping container. That was when the source of the shot stepped through the fiery wreckage. Even from where he was hiding, Caliber could hear the gears grinding inside the mechanical horror as it racked another rocket from its storage bays.

Revol Blast was a sight to behold. He was an imposing grey-armored robot most Kamen Riders could identify, from the times he’d fought the first Riders. This version had a few upgrades: on his shoulders were small box-shaped launchers that Caliber already knew hid the launchers for his mini-homing missiles. Those weren’t the ones he was really worried about. Instead, his oversized eyes were focused on the cannon barrels that covered his arms. One of which was still smoking from the rocket that’d almost blown Caliber up a few seconds ago.

The other one was already starting to glow with an upcoming shot, and it was already aimed right at Caliber’s heart.

“Final Target: Locked,” Revol Blast declared. “Mission Completion Imminent.”

His cannon roared and Caliber was already running away from the shipping container where he’d taken cover. At the same time he turned and ran, Caliber saw the launchers on his enemy’s shoulders pop open.

Again his cover exploded, blowing the sides of the empty metal bin into the air. One slapped into Caliber and sent the Kamen Rider sliding across the warehouse floor on his back. But through the pain he could hear the storm of buzzing darts homing in on him through the explosion. His arms aching, Caliber pulled the transparent riot shield off his shoulders. The dark blast mark on its front was still sizzling faintly from the last missile he’d tried to block with it. Caliber hoped it would stand up to one more attack.

Or was that really his only option?

No, it wasn’t. And playing the good guy hadn’t gotten him anywhere except slapped all over the Game Area.

The others had warned him not to try and use it again. But they weren’t the ones in here, about to be blow back out. Through the roof.

He yanked the Dual Gashat out of his Driver and twisted its knob the other way. To the side that had the label saying “Bang Bang Menace”, showing a cigarette-smoking yakuza in a dark suit and sunglasses, carrying an assault rifle. “ **A smoking gun in your hands! The police are on your tail! Shoot! Steal! CONQUER! The World Is Yours!** ” the game screeched. Over Caliber’s head the title screen of the game formed, showing the yakuza firing his assault rifle underneath the title.

The white and blue of his police’s armor shattered just leaving his black undersuit and the silver chestplate showing his health bar. The icons underneath flashed, changing from a riot shotgun and the rectangular shield to an assault rifle and an attache case. The blue sclera of his mask’s eyes turned red. Plates of new, shiny black armor came looping of the title screen and attached to Kamen Rider Caliber’s body, forming into the armored likeness of a dark suit, white shirt and tie underneath his chest armor.

Next was the last change, where the clunky shotgun he’d been carrying before flew out of the Rider’s hand. An assault rifle with a green body and orange barrel and butt, two blue and pink buttons lodged in the side, dropped into Kamen Rider Caliber’s hands. And he raised the weapon to his face and fired at the incoming homing missiles. His shots were wild, but they were fast, and the air was full of tiny explosions from the homing missiles. Blasted out of the air before they got close enough to scorch Kamen Rider Caliber.

Who was off and running across the warehouse as the surprised Revol Blaster tried to target him. Caliber threw himself forward in a somersault suddenly, rolled behind the staircase at the edge of the room leading to the walkway that spanned the entire warehouse. He grabbed the railing and vaulted it, turned and grabbed the railing on the next higher incline and jumped that too.

“Target: Acquired,” Revol Blast said, loud enough for Kamen Rider Caliber to hear even as far away as he was. He knew the Corrupture was just trying to make him trip up, but he climbed the side of the next incline. The sound of gears grinding from the robotic monster loading another rocket reached him, but by then Kamen Rider Caliber was at the top. “Target, Lock. Fire,” Revol Blast said dispassionately.

“Good idea,” Caliber whispered, and took off at a run across the catwalk at the top of the stairs. Two missiles streaked up and exploded against the corner, making the staircase collapse with a horrible shriek of tearing metal. Caliber was running for his life already, turned partly to the right to take aim with his rifle.

Atop the Corrupture’s shoulders its pillboxes sprang up to fire again. Caliber didn’t run this time. Didn’t say a word. All he did was raise his weapon, and squeeze the trigger.

A steady burst of fire ripped across one pillbox, leaving it a twisted wreck. Next it sent sparks erupting from Revol Blast’s eyes, making the Corrupture jerk back in pain, which only made Caliber grin. He wasn’t done, firing into the pillbox on Revol Blast’s other shoulder and reducing it to a jagged mess.

“Tracking…Target,” Revol Blast almost gasped. Sounding like he was trying his best to pretend he hadn’t just taken so much damage.

“I’m right here!” the Rider yelled, stopping where he was and waving his arms back and forth. Yet again the sound of gears grinding as Revol Blast as he loaded new missiles. Caliber lowered his rifle and stuck his hand inside the armor of his “jacket”. It came back out holding a grenade. He lobbed it.

Both arm-cannons were glowing from inside with the firepower they were about to unleash. The grenade rolled along the rim of one barrel and then dropped inside. With bullets he’d taken straight to his eyes, Revol Blast had never even seen it coming. Caliber giggled and turned away, covering the sides of his helmet with his hands.

The blast was horrific. A fountain of flame erupted out of the barrel, leaving the end white-hot. It drooped until it touched the floor and puddled on the concrete. Revol Blast staggered, making a trail of hissing metal across the floor. Best of all, the Corrupture was stumbling around blindly from the damage he’d taken to his face from both of Caliber’s attacks. The Rider raised his rifle agai as he started up his finisher.

“ **Shakariki Critical Shred!** ” Caliber glanced down in surprise as he heard that, since it wasn’t the voice of his game. A streak of light raced across the room and crashed into Revol Blast. The forceful impact snapped the melted barrel of cannon off from the floor and whatever ran into Revol left skinny tire tracks across his chest armor. The streak of light swooped around as it came to the corner and came back, crashing into Revol again.

Caliber groaned and facepalmed. He should’ve expected the others to come looking after he’d taken so long. A loading door crashed to the floor as a muscular figure in red armor with spikes decorating the shoulders and helmet stepped through. He threw a metal football, covered with spikes too, at the badly-battered Revol Blast, who had time for one last metallic groan before the ball lodged in one shoulder exploded.

The Rider in red looked up at the catwalk. “I know you’re up there, Caliber. Come on down,” he said. “I also see you did what you promised what you wouldn’t do again…” he added, warningly.

Caliber scoffed. “He was gonna blow me away. Would you have liked it if I let him, Blitz?” he asked, casually leaning his rifle back against his shoulder.

Blitz looked up at him, unmoving, and looking unimpressed. “Take out the game, Caliber. Take it out now,” he reiterated.

“Or _what_?” Caliber answered.

“Or I’ll come up there and do it for you,” came Thrasher’s familiar voice. The other Rider, in black armor with yellow racing stripes, walked up next to Blitz with her skateboard held over one shoulder.

Placing one hand on the railing, Kamen Rider Caliber tossed himself over the side of the catwalk and landed in a graceful crouch. He stood up, finger still on the trigger of his rifle. The other two Riders visibly tensed. Painfully slowly he closed the fingers of his free hand around the Duel Gashat in his belt.

And pulled it back out with a **GASHUUUN** that seemed to suck all the tension out of the entire warehouse.

Out of his armor, Caliber seemed dazed for a few seconds, as if coming down from an adrenaline rush. He looked into the eyes of the others, out of their armor now too, and looking at him suspiciously.

Holding up his hands defensively, Caliber said, “Hey, guys, he had even more firepower than we thought…he would’ve destroyed me if I hadn’t changed.” Their expressions didn’t change. If anything, unsurprisingly, they looked at him a little more sharply.

Thrasher spoke up first. “You know what happens when use the violent game. _We_ know what happens to you when you use the violent game.”

“You get violent,” Blitz growled.

Caliber turns around and headed for the door Blitz had knocked down in his way in. “You two are starting to sound just like my parents. Video games don’t turn you into a psychopath. You guys should know better than most people…”

The two exchanged a worried look, then followed after their friend.


	14. Another Way

The top hat spun top over bottom in her hands. Every eye in the room was focused on it. All of them saw the same thing: the hat was totally empty.

And so it was a bit of a surprise when she turned it upside down and a white rabbit stuck its head out of the hat. “Not bad, huh?” Kamen Rider Presto asked with a giggle.

One of the kids watching waved a hand dismissively. “That’s a really old trick!” the boy said. “I be there’s a secret compartment in it or something.”

Presto looked over at him, her eyes seeming to widen in surprise, the oblivious rabbit hopping out onto the floor of the Corrupture Ward. “Really?” she asked, turning the hat the other way around with the hole in the bottom. She gave the hat a shake and another rabbit fell out, its coat dark brown. “Gosh, look at that!” Presto said as the second rabbit hopped away, and a black rabbit fell out onto the floor. And a fourth rabbit, coat white with black spots. “This must be the best secret compartment ever, don’t you guys think??”

She pressed her fingertips to her mouthplate and somehow whistled. The quartet of rabbits hopped through the surprised crowd of kids and then back to where Presto was kneeling. She flipped open the top of her hat, showing the hole went all the way through. Taking a jump, the black and white rabbit bounced into Presto’s hat. Then the rabbit that was all black, the one that was all brown, and lastly the one was all white.

And Presto turned her hat to the kids to show the hole was empty before spinning it in her hands and putting it back on top of her head.

“WOW.”

The Rider leaned forward to a chorus of applause from the young patients. “If you think that was good,” she said gravely, and the kids fell silent. “…then wait til you see this!” Presto giggled. She doffed her hat again, tapped the edge with her wand, and a playing card came floating up.

A gasp of amazement rose out of the crowd too. All the young viewers twisted their heads to watch the flow of playing cards coming out of Kamen Rider Presto’s shiny black top hat. They snaked out, flowed around in a circle, and twirled up to form the shape of a heart.

“But wait, there’s more!” she announced and twirled the long black wand in her hand. It gave a chiming sound and the serpent of cards twisted around into the shape of a diamond. Another twirl, another chime, and they looped into the shape of a spade.

“For the grand finale…!” One last twirl, one last chime. The cards looped into a circle once, twice, three times, and wrapped around the bottom to form a spade. The kids in the Corrupture ward she was performing for clapped at the sight. “Was this your card?” the Rider giggled, and the outline of cards erupted all over the room. Each card flipped into the waiting hands of one of the patients, and in a soft flash changed to show Kamen Rider Presto winking at them. “Your very own souvenir of the show!”

Most of the kids split up, tucking their cards away in pockets or in bags or backpacks. A few started trying to bargain with other kids for their cards.

A young boy and girl approached the Rider slowly, their eyes glistening with nervousness, and they looked away when she turned her head and looked right at them. “Everything okay, kids?” she asked calmly.

“Well,…Miss Presto,” the girl said, and bit her lip. Presto nodded and bent down to get closer to their eye level. “Do you have time to just do tricks for us kids like this?” the girl finally asked.

Presto cocked her head slightly. “What do you mean, honey?”

The girl retreated a step at the question, but the boy gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. She managed to say, “I don’t know…don’t you need to be out there, fighting monsters?”

“Aaaah, I see. I was kind of expecting a question like that sometime,” Kamen Rider Presto sighed. “Let me ask you guys a question too. Do you think fighting is the only way to help people?”

An uncomfortable look contorted the girl’s face for a second, and Presto reached out and touched her cheek. “Sweetie, there are lots of ways to help people. Like you can show scared kids the world’s an amazing place, and they should work hard to get well so they can go see it someday.”

She stood up again, and the boy blanched at what she’d said. “The world sounds boring when we hear about it in school!” he protested.

“Oh kids, I know!” Presto giggled. “Believe it or not, I was a kid once too. School isn’t the only way to learn about things. Besides, if the world isn’t amazing, why are so many people willing to fight for it?” She spun her wand in her hand, then reached out and touched the two kids’ cards, giving them gold borders. “Think about it, kiddo.” She looked around and announced, “Okay everybody, time for the last trick of the day! Watch closely!”

She lifted her wand high and a spray of confetti shot out of the top and cascaded down.

When the kids followed the falling shower of paper, it took them a few seconds to notice Kamen Rider Presto wasn’t there anymore.

Only her message remained.


	15. Fall of a Hero

A shadow darted across the dark wall, but that time he knew he saw something.

That time, it wasn’t going to get away.

Because this time, he wasn’t after it by himself.

“Noir, do you hear me?” Kamen Rider Joe whispered into the Mini Gashat he had in one boxing-gloved hand. “I just saw Jackie’s shadow, looked like it was headed for the back stairs!”

Above the cartridge’s circuit board was a projected a small holographic screen, showing his partner. Kamen Rider Noir was tall but skinny, wearing a plastic-looking black fedora over his mask’s giant green eyes, the armor over his chest styled to look like a trench coat. “I’ll spot him if he comes that way, but you come down after him so we can catch him between us,” Noir whispered back.

Joe nodded affirmatively. “I’m on my way!”

XXX  
  


Behind him, Jackie the Blade could hear the Kamen Rider’s heavy footsteps coming through the upstairs room he’d managed to escape . He knew Kamen Rider Joe was powerful, but the “hero” was as subtle as one of his haymakers. If Jackie just had a chance to hide, the big clumsy idiot would probably go right past him in the dark mansion Game Area they were in.

The Corrupture started slinking into a shadowy corner, chuckling faintly to himself. He stopped suddenly as he felt the barrel of an oversized handgun pressed into his spine.

“You didn’t really think a game like Joe’s would create a Game Area like this, did you, Jackie?” its owner asked.

An amused but disturbing chuckle. “No, I guess not. He needs five hundred screaming fans in the stands,” Jackie said. “But you, Noir…I think I can respect you.”

Noir answered by squeezing the trigger on his gun.

Already Jackie had been twisting out of the way but Noir’s shot still tore into his side. Stifling a scream, Jackie clutched his wounded side, shiny purple pixels dribbling out between his fingers. He kept moving with the force of his spin and swung the serrated blade at Kamen Rider Noir’s head.

Already Noir had been expecting the Corrupture’s counterattack, throwing himself onto his back as the knife whipped by. Its blade skidded along the brim of his hat, the skull on the bottom of the knife’s handle staring into Noir’s face as the deadly weapon went past. “Almost got me that time, Jackie,” Noir taunted from flat on his back. “You might actually be getting better.”

The Corrupture grunted. His slicked back hair, supposedly the color of his victims’ blood, seemed to get lighter as pixels spilled over the floor from his open wound. But he smiled with his misaligned teeth. “You too, Noir,” he wheezed. “I mean, you actually got the drop on me. And blew a hole through me, too.”

Noir jumped to his feet and the two faced each other down from across the room for a second of silence. Suddenly he sprang to his side and fired his pistol twice in midair. The first shot went wide and Jackie the Blade deflected the other second one on his namesake. With an unsettling grin on his skeletal face, the Corrupture villain lunged with his long knife held out in front of him. Aimed at Noir’s chest.

Just before it could impale him Noir swung his gun up and knocked the blade away from his heart. His gun barrel stopped just underneath Jackie’s chin, but the tip of the grinning villain’s knife prodded against the bottom of Noir’s chin too.

“Heh, looks like we got us a Mexican standoff,” Jackie chuckled.

“Heh, looks like you were so busy fighting me, you forgot something,” Noir chuckled back.

Jackie the Blade only had a fraction of a second to process what he’d heard before a fist the size of a basketball smashed into the side of his head. Noir tried to lean away but the Corrupture’s dagger sliced across his chest as Jackie was knocked away by the powerful blow. He grunted from the pain and stumbled, with the new combatant jogging up to his side. The newcomer had yellow and green spiked hair atop his mask, matching the green shorts with their bright yellow waistband he wore.

“You did a great job keeping him busy, Noir!” Kamen Rider Joe congratulated his partner, bumping him on the shoulder with a fist covered in a shiny oversize boxing glove.

Noir shoved Joe’s shoulder. “And you did a good job getting me stabbed when you punched him, idiot,” he growled.

“Hey, I’m sorry! But it’s not that bad, is it?” Joe asked as he inspected the gash in Noir’s armor. “See? Your Rider Gauge only went down by one.”

Shaking his head, Noir muttered, “Let’s just finish this idiot off.”

Suddenly Jackie the Blade threw his coat open wide. A barrage of knives of all shapes and sizes flew out of the darkness inside. Flew out at the pair of Kamen Riders. Noir gasped in fear and sprinted out of the way. One blade found its mark in his side regardless and the detective Rider screamed before going down. Kamen Rider Joe spared a quick glance at his fallen partner, then did what he did best.

He raised his powerful fists and started punching. Straights. Hooks. Knocking the incoming blades out of the way on his giant armored fists. Instead of his body, Jackie’s weapons impaled themselves in the walls or clattered off them and fell all over the floor. In a few seconds Kamen Rider Joe had crossed the area between them and threw a right straight that hit Jackie with a sound like a sonic boom.

Jackie hit the wall with a crack nearly as loud. He slid down the wall, his sunken eyes spinning in their sockets. Joe grabbed his shoulders and lifted the villain off the floor. A ray of light arced out, Jackie’s knife seeking the Rider’s throat, but he easily blocked it on the edge of his boxing glove. “This is gonna be your final count, Corrupture!” Joe declared.

“If knives were my only trick, maybe,” Jackie sneered.

“Huh?”

Opening his jaws wide Jackie the Blade stuck out his tongue. The tip was just as sharp as the knife in his hand, and hit Kamen Rider Joe right in the throat. A surprised gurgle was the only sound the Kamen Rider had a chance to make before he landed flat on his back. It only took a second before Joe was back on his feet but by then Jackie the Blade had kicked open the back door and run outside.

Kamen Rider Joe was justifiably proud of his footspeed and in no time he came running out into the backyard of the mansion. He looked back and forth, and back again, but there was no sign of the Corrupture villain. Shadowy woods was the only thing in front of him.

He was about to turn and head back in to check on Noir. See if he was okay to use his power to see in the dark. Joe never got the chance.

An eruption of stinging, penetrating _pain_ hit him between his shoulder. Joe went down into the dirt, his last thoughts hoping that at least Kamen Rider Noir would be able to keep on fighting.

XXX

“ _Mission accomplished. Kamen Rider Joe has been successfully eliminated._ ”

“ _Excellent. Bring his game and join me in Japan. You’ll be my champion in the tournament I have planned_.”

“ _Understood, Master Byougen…_ ”


End file.
